André Aciman’s novel is a series of ghost stories interrupted by fleeting flashes of light.
The novel succeeds, in part, by rejecting uncomplicated constructions of blame or causality.
There’s something uncommonly relaxing about many of McPhee’s patient elaborations of things known and unknown.
At its best, History of Violence about the tension between desire and danger, between passion and destruction.
Vicuña is populated with characters even more thinly veiled than Gore Vidal’s were 60 years ago in The Best Man.
Friendship may read to many, especially those unfamiliar with New York, as one giant inside joke without a punchline.
In a lot of ways, See Now Then tries to be like a Virginia Woolf novel, particularly To the Lighthouse.
It creates a this-is-your-life kind of recap of how the long hours around the publication of those two great novels, The Corrections and Freedom, were killed.
The Third Reich is easy to enjoy as apprentice-work for the talent that would soon assert itself.
What we can glean from the story comes to us in the form of characters defined not by marriage, but by sex—the having of it, the anticipation, and the desire to explicate of it.
It makes two very notable exceptions to make clear what it’s after, introducing us to its subject well past his birth and receding from his death at the book’s conclusion.
The book’s prose is restless and extremely private, reflecting in its rhythms and selective attentions the ways in which the characters think without ever revealing exactly what.
Imagine now that passionate strain of teenage melancholia conflated with and compounded by the familiar cruelties of middle age.
Milo Burke’s America isn’t in the throes of environmental or theocratic chaos, just a long, slow slide into mediocrity.