Critique
Books Considered to be one of the best working English novelists of the moment, Alan Hollinghurst’s latest read ‘A Strangers Child’ has a lot to live up to. Set in the early 1900s it unravels ‘an inversion of the Brideshead theme,’ explains Theo Tait of London’s The Guardian, ‘where the outsider, the stranger’s child, is an aristocrat visiting a middleclass home [the Sawles of Two Acres] and seducing the family in it.’ Happily for Hollinghurst, the novel does not fail to impress. ‘Where so many fiction writers seem stylish but austere, or full of life but messy, Hollinghurst has his cake and eats it,’ says Tait. ‘It is elegant, seductive and extremely enjoyable to read, and peppered with astute, apparently casual noticings.’ The Daily Mail’s John Harding agrees: ‘Line by line writing is as delightful as ever. A tremendously readable and engrossing book.’ In the US ‘The Astral’ by American Novelist Kate Christensen hit the shelves last month, a tale set in Green Point Brooklyn in an old rose-coloured building where the central protagonist – a middle-aged poet called Harry Quirk– is going through a divorce. ‘This novel suggests that even deeply rooted relationships can be dismantled, and that sometimes it’s best to just cut your losses,’ comments Alice Gregory of Oprah Magazine. ‘Harry reflects on his marriage’s trajectory, deconstructing its fabric to find out what went wrong and how to fix it, he also is endeavoring to engage meaningfully with his grown children,’ elaborates the Associated Press. Ron Charles from the Washington Post also celebrates the author’s latest tome; ‘Christensen has somehow – again – created a captivatingly believable male narrator, although she can’t see 60 on the horizon (she’s 48), has not been married to a tempestuous Mexican woman for 30 years or published largely ignored poetry in academic journals’. Which no doubt explains why her previous novel, ‘The Great Man’ won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Family struggles appear to be something of a literary trend as Michael Kimbal releases his latest novel, ‘Us’. As Jonathan Messenger of Time Out Chicago explains, it revolves around an ‘elderly man who lives in a crumbling house with his wife and wakes up to find she has suffered a seizure in the middle of the night.’ After taking her to a hospital, where she resumes a comatose state, his wife awakes and the two return home where she lives out her final days. ‘Kimball’s short chapters cast such a hypnotic spell, the reader is able to plug directly into the character’s grief,’ says Messenger. Other high-acclaim comes from the Los Angeles Times’ Matt Bell, who comments ‘there is a whole life contained in this slim novel, a life as funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking as any other, rendered with honest complexity and freshness by Kimball’s sharp writing.’
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