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“…helps illuminate Hurston’s path to iconic status. –Lauren Oyler on Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror( London Review of Books) Because no negative realisation about herself seems to keep her from committing the same crime in the next essay, the effect is akin to getting in ahead of criticism, PR-style, in the hope of lessening its impact on the brand … She is careful to mention her relative ‘luck’ and privilege before she complains, but usually only so that she can justify aligning herself with the suffering of people with whom she has little in common, making her experience seem worse and theirs not that bad … For readers hoping to optimise the process of understanding their own lives, Tolentino’s book will seem ‘productive’.
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It may be risky for a millennial author to declare herself delusional and claim that scamming is ‘the definitive millennial ethos’ it may also keep her from looking like a delusional scammer … In order to solve the problem of her possible wrongness, she adopts an elevated version of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist programme, constantly contradicting herself and referring to her shortcomings, among which are attention seeking, a desire for control, and equivocation … calibrated for success in a media culture in which acknowledgment equals absolution and absolution is seen as crucial to success. “These critics aren’t hysterical because they have uncontrollable, misunderstood responses to social problems they perform hysteria because they know their audience respects the existence of those problems, and the chance that they may be sincere makes them difficult to criticise … At the sentence level, it’s not difficult to understand what hysterical critics are saying rather, it’s so easy that their lack of precision doesn’t matter … She primarily uses personal experience to substantiate-rather than ‘get to the bottom of’-her ideas, though her tendency towards hyperbole has the effect of making them seem entirely subjective … The other purpose of personal experience in these essays is to act as a kind of disclosure or waiver. –Dwight Garner on Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness ( The New York Times) He catches you up so effortlessly that you feel you are in the hands of one of those animals that anesthetizes you before devouring you.” Greenwell offers restraint in service of release. This writer’s sentences are so dazzlingly fresh that it as if he has thrown his cape in the street in front of each one. You begin to wonder how his humorlessness will wear over time … Yet there are no failures of equilibrium. It’s as if, while other writers offer data, he is providing metadata … This novel’s second half is not quite the equal of its first.
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Every detail in every scene glows with meaning. It’s a novel in search of ravishment … Greenwell is a sensitive writer about the student-teacher relationship … Greenwell has an uncanny gift, one that comes along rarely. You intuit its seriousness and grace from its first pages. In bed is where Greenwell’s men work out and reveal the essences of their personalities … Carnal moments are accelerants they’re where Greenwell’s existential and political themes are underlined, then set ablaze … a better, richer, more confident novel. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage … There’s a moral quality to these extended sessions. “… incandescent … Anyone who read Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You (2016), knows that his writing about sex is altogether scorching.