Charles Finch on Rachel Cusk's Outline:
Instead, the fashion has turned toward granular introverts like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner and Teju Cole, who write barely novels, all in an ambiguous first-person indistinguishable from the author's own voice. These books are pointed, alert, not very funny. Their subject is the fundamental strangeness and unavailability of the world.
James Lasdun on Edith Pearlman's Honeydew:
Without the drag of observed reality the stories float weightlessly into the state of cloying sweetness that seems to be their preferred atmosphere. Bad things happen, but they never seem fully believed in, and so the happiness bestowed on the characters who survive them feels unearned, kitschy.
Craig Morgan Teicher on Louis Gluck's Faithful and Virtuous Night:
Glück’s truth-telling has its roots in a passivity the artist must hone, the ability to observe the mind and the world working on each other, changing each other. The artist doesn’t change the world; she watches it, watches her mind interpreting it. The artist’s greatest sacrifice is involvement in her own life, an involvement that would prevent her from writing it or painting it.
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