Ann Beattie speaks to her characters’ persistence in the face of loneliness and ambiguity.
Auster takes turns with his characters, alternating chapters and points of view, inhabiting most of these with convincing insight.
These stories engage with themes of disconnection, alienation, and the costs of straddling racial, sexual, and emotional divides.
Imagine now that passionate strain of teenage melancholia conflated with and compounded by the familiar cruelties of middle age.
The book allows us to construct our own understanding of Dahl and his oeuvre of weird, inventive, and wickedly funny narratives.