Reviews

on "Detransition, Baby"

"A bracing reminder that ambition can still wear restraint as armor."

140d ago

on "There There"

"Sentences built the way cathedrals are built — patient, vaulted, in service of light."

147d ago

on "Real Americans"

"Few novels this year balance their formal daring with such tender attention to character."

157d ago

on "Lake Success"

"The pacing is unfashionable, which is to say honest."

166d ago

on "Biography of X"

"An essential book — not in the marketing sense, but in the original one."

164d ago

on "My Year of Rest and Relaxation"

"A quiet, perfect engine of grief and recovery."

69d ago

on "Austerlitz"

"Reads like a writer who finally stopped apologising for what she came to say."

166d ago

on "At Night All Blood Is Black"

"There is real craft here, and rarer still, real conviction beneath it."

165d ago

on "The Topeka School"

"The dialogue does the work three pages of exposition usually do, and does it better."

174d ago

on "The Meursault Investigation"

"I admire how little the book performs for the reader. Trust runs both ways."

157d ago

on "Jawbone"

"A debut that already understands what it's willing to lose for the sake of a sentence."

184d ago

on "Time Shelter"

"Structurally fearless. The braided timeline could have collapsed, and instead it sings."

128d ago

on "The Argonauts"

"The interiority is earned. Nothing in here is decoration."

21d ago

on "The Removed"

"I disagreed with the ending and I still couldn't put it down. That's a compliment."

42d ago

on "The Country of Others"

"Note the verbs. The whole book is doing its work in the verbs."

62d ago

on "Death in Smoke"

"A novel that respects its reader's intelligence and rewards their patience."

57d ago

on "All Fours"

"Spare prose, generous heart. A difficult balance, beautifully held."

56d ago

on "Jawbone"

"The minor characters are drawn with the same care as the leads. That alone is unusual."

173d ago

on "Brother Alive"

"Underread, probably underrated, certainly worth your evening."

176d ago

on "An Orchestra of Minorities"

"A novel that argues for slowness as a moral position, and almost convinces me."

158d ago

on "Death in Smoke"

"The middle section is where the book becomes itself. Stay with it."

131d ago

on "The Topeka School"

"There is a confidence in the silences here that I rarely see in a second book."

70d ago

on "Death in Smoke"

"I read it twice in a fortnight and found a different novel each time."

26d ago

on "My Brilliant Friend"

"The author has a real gift for endings that land sideways and still land."

27d ago

on "Compass"

"Formally restrained, emotionally enormous. A combination I keep wanting more of."

193d ago

on "Joan is Okay"

"An unfussy book about fussy people, which is harder than it sounds."

98d ago

on "If I Survive You"

"Reads like a working notebook in the best sense — alive, provisional, unprotected."

175d ago

on "Austerlitz"

"If you want pyrotechnics, look elsewhere. If you want a book to live with, this."

154d ago

on "Tenth of December"

"The translator deserves a paragraph of her own; the rhythm in English is uncanny."

193d ago

on "There There"

"A small book that opens outward the longer you sit with it."

186d ago

on "Such a Fun Age"

"The ethics of the narrator's silence are the real subject of this novel."

198d ago

on "Mater 2-10"

"I'd teach the second chapter. It does in twelve pages what most books take fifty for."

163d ago

on "God Sees Me Everywhere"

"There is grief here that doesn't beg to be witnessed. That's rare and that's the point."

131d ago

on "Inland"

"A novel of weather and waiting. Both are doing more than they let on."

130d ago

on "Do Not Say We Have Nothing"

"The closing image earns every page that walked us to it."

135d ago

on "Colored Television"

"I'd file this beside the early Gallant and feel no embarrassment about it."

10d ago

on "Mona"

"An almost essayistic novel — and I mean that as praise."

138d ago

on "Train Dreams"

"The book refuses catharsis and offers something stranger and more durable."

89d ago

on "Train Dreams"

"A working writer's book. You can see the joinery, and the joinery is sound."

92d ago

on "God Sees Me Everywhere"

"The set pieces are unshowy; the cumulative effect is devastating."

95d ago

on "At Night All Blood Is Black"

"Not a perfect novel. A necessary one."

197d ago

on "Jawbone"

"The mother is the engine of the book even when she's offstage. That's craft."

3d ago

on "Brown Girls"

"I admire the refusal to explain. Mystery, here, is a structural choice."

67d ago

on "Minor Detail"

"A novel that takes domestic life seriously without sentimentalising it."

105d ago

on "Travellers"

"The prose has weather in it. You can feel the season change on the page."

178d ago

on "Train Dreams"

"Some books are written. This one feels remembered."

113d ago

on "Out of Darkness, Shining Light"

"A small triumph of voice. The first paragraph tells you everything and nothing."

6d ago

on "Detransition, Baby"

"The book holds two registers — comic and elegiac — and trusts the reader to hold both."

46d ago

on "The Topeka School"

"I kept stopping to copy lines into a notebook. A good sign and a bad one for my notebook."

8d ago

on "Minor Detail"

"Reads like the writer was unembarrassed to be serious. We need more of that."

91d ago

on "The Country of Others"

"The structural turn at the midpoint reframes everything before it. Beautifully done."

171d ago

on "There There"

"An act of literary attention so sustained it begins to feel like a moral stance."

110d ago

on "Such a Fun Age"

"A novel that earns its quiet. Not all quiet novels do."

147d ago

on "Trust Exercise"

"I'd shelve it next to the early Bowen. Same understated nerve."

111d ago

on "Brother Alive"

"The book is more interested in attention than in plot, and that is its plot."

106d ago

on "Inland"

"A controlled, exact, almost orchestral piece of work."

164d ago

on "Inland"

"What looks like restraint on first read reveals itself as patience on the second."

50d ago

on "All This Could Be Different"

"The dialogue is doing what good dialogue does: refusing to tell you everything."

76d ago

on "The Family Chao"

"The author's ear for class and register is unforced and unusually precise."

192d ago

on "Train Dreams"

"An unsentimental book about love, which is the only kind worth writing."

144d ago

on "Mona"

"A novel that knows when to look away. Half the work is in the looking away."

25d ago

on "An Orchestra of Minorities"

"The chapter titled simply 'Sunday' is one of the best things I've read this year."

188d ago

on "The Old Drift"

"There's a real argument inside this novel, and it doesn't make itself easy to win."

138d ago

on "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead"

"A book in which nothing happens twice, and the second time it breaks you."

55d ago

on "Do Not Say We Have Nothing"

"Quiet, exact, and slow in the way good rivers are slow."

28d ago

on "God Sees Me Everywhere"

"The author writes mothers the way Tolstoy wrote weather: as climate."

30d ago

on "Biography of X"

"An interior novel that never collapses into solipsism. That balance is rare."

74d ago

on "Do Not Say We Have Nothing"

"A book to read in autumn, in a small room, with one lamp."

187d ago

on "Compass"

"The novel argues — gently — for noticing. I want to live the way it reads."

36d ago

on "North Woods"

"Brave in its smallness. Brave in its refusal to console."

193d ago

on "Tenth of December"

"An unfashionable novel in the best sense of the word."

139d ago

on "The Tale of the Heike"

"The book has the temperature of a confession and the structure of a sonata."

93d ago

on "Elena Knows"

"The author trusts her sentences. They repay the trust."

89d ago

on "Cantoras"

"A novel about thresholds — doorways, ages, decisions — and the long air around them."

163d ago

on "Brown Girls"

"An unshowy masterwork from a writer who has been quietly building toward this for years."

109d ago