His satire snaps wittily, his interweaving of scientific research and romantic intrigue is startlingly clever, and his psychological insights feel both genuine and comic. Individual stories constantly shift the novel's setting and pace, changing registers, pushing into every cranny of these people's lives... RaveThe Washington Post[D]esperation pervades every page of Simon Han's debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened.... What's most fascinating about Nights When Nothing Happened is the way Han, who was born in China and raised in Texas, explores how anxiety thwarts the archetypal experience of immigrant success. It's a bloody parody of suburban sanctimony and a feminist revision of macho heroism. This was, after all, a time of perpetual gasping at new scientific and consumer miracles … In a book full of conjurers, Gold emerges as the best magician of all, pulling surprises out of his hat throughout this wildly entertaining story, which captures America in a moment of change and wonder. RaveThe Washington PostAlvita struts and laughs her way across these pages like she owns them... Galchen has a Kafkaesque sense of the way the exercise of authority inflates egos and twists logic... In fact, she's most incisive when it comes to the members of the Birnam Wood co-op... Catton has somewhat less success bringing that level of verisimilitude to Lemoine... Ron randomly pulls a pen image. Moving through short chapters, mostly narrated in the first person by a rotating collection of characters, Tracy Flick Can't Win offers a sobering vision of lives marinating in regret... It's French, but not trop francais. Even the syncopated structure of Utopia Avenue demonstrates how attentive he is to the rhythm of human experience. Franzen is working closer to the practical theology and moral realism of John Updike's Rabbit, Run and In the Beauty of the Lilies.
Then Jiminy Cricket pops up — yep — and another town is overrun with mastodons. Whether she really exists or not, Faina, as they eventually call her, will capture your imagination just as she captures Jack and Mabel's... [Faina is] another in the growing crowd of fiercely independent girls we've seen in recent fiction including Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones... And he's a master at letting the weirdness of situations slowly accrue. That leaves little distance between the narrator and her words in which we can sense the mysteries of an actual mind. What Virgil calls the \'fable-like atmosphere\' remains simply cloudy, clotted by earnest pronouncements... Enger tempts us to imagine we can catch the scent of magic wafting through this story, but too often we get these limp aphorisms instead. Time flows and eddies in this telling, rushing forward and looping back the way legends gradually coalesce in the shared memories of scattered people... Ron randomly pulls a pen.io. polemical as the novel may be, it never loses its moral complexity. Another one involving a mother's response to a police shooting is a tour de force that could spin off and persist on its own as a classic short story... I wanted to like Virgil Wander, and I appreciate Enger's attempt to capture the subterranean tremors that can unsettle a person or a town, but the story's assorted eccentricities never gain much forward momentum — until, suddenly, all its little puzzles explode in the final, absurd pages.
Personal episodes mingle effectively with engaging disquisitions on, say, the dilution of antitrust law... paradox runs like a wire through this book, which so poignantly expresses the loneliness of pining for one's own homeland. The resulting confluence of fact and fiction provides a damning indictment of judicial racism. But if The Candy House is less uniformly successful than A Visit From the Goon Squad, it still contains terrific parts... Much of The Candy House takes place in a future influenced by Bix's revolution, but the novel rarely contends with the implications of that premise for Bix's life, the tech industry or the world shaped by it. The result is Paradise Lost but with more gangsters: a zany interrogation of religious concepts in a wholly secular context... But the investment of attention will be fully rewarded. RaveThe Washington PostThis is a novel of aggressive introspection, but Greenwell writes with such candor and psychological precision that the effect is oddly propulsive. PanChristian Science MonitorBroad as this comedy is, Pierre takes his toughest shots at American media. Maguire explores this theme most sensitively over Dirk's long friendship with a gay musician... Maguire suggests that we all pine for some vaguely recalled but tantalizing moment from childhood. That isn't a feeling literary fiction seems to have much use for, but Ivey conveys surprising moments of happiness with such heartfelt conviction. Despite its dramatic opening, the bulk of the story is far more immersive than propulsive... PanThe Washington PostAlthough Sleeping Beauties offers glimpses of trouble around the world — riots in Washington, a downed jet, etc. For all that he eventually reveals, some details are forever dropped between the shifting plates of survivors' memories. Hollinghurst rarely strays far from his protagonist's sexual fantasies and exploits … As AIDS ravages the gay community and scandal rocks the Fedden household, Nick finds himself as abandoned as he ever feared, and the compensation of beauty seems heartbreakingly tragic. Indeed, the only motion through most of these pages is generated by Barnes aggressively winking at us... Barnes captures the language of adoration with exquisite poise, the devoted student's endless cycle of qualifications and special pleading... when Neil inherits his teacher's journals, well, you'll want to catch up on your favorite podcasts...
The novel's scrambled chronology initially feels like a challenge, but the chapters are clearly dated and named as they move to focus on a grandmother, her daughters and her grandchildren. The results may sometimes feel surreal, but this technique allows her to capture the impossibly strange events of real life... Near the end, Kostas's precious tree tells us, \'If it's love you're after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig. She has constructed this story as a quest, but the path forward feels like descending stairs in an Escher drawing... Readers will come to see that Stringfellow is demonstrating the erratic movements of history, the false starts and reversals and, yes, the moments of progress that are reflected in our haphazard march toward realizing King's vision for America...
It's a tremendously enlivening dramatic effect... One of the many pleasures of this story stems from Vera's emotional range... a passionate love story purified in the crucible of suffering.... All these intimate and finely drawn details are nested within a masterful work of historical fiction that traces monumental economic and political currents... Vera never reduces him or any of her characters to mere cogs in this vast system. He creates the arresting, hushed scenes for which he's so well known just as effectively as he whips up murders that compete, pint for spilled pint, with those immortal Greek playwrights. Although the form is smaller, the scope is broader, and the overall effect even more impressive than his novel. What feels adorable and raw in the early chapters grows merely moody as Sam comes of age... Unfortunately, Bewilderment goes out of its way to cast the tale of Robin's miraculous evolution as a green version of Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon.
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