Where his first effort felt virtuosic but somewhat airless, Marra here emerges with an oxygenizing wisdom and an arsenal of wit as inexhaustible as it is unlikely, given such forlorn terrain.
But these missteps barely register in the wake of a book this ambitious and fearless, one that offers so much to enjoy and admire. At a time when a lot of fiction by young American writers veers toward familiar settings and safe formal choices, Marra’s far-ranging, risky and explicitly political book marks him as a writer with an original, even singular sensibility.
Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page — of those whom history has erased.
