Review from The New Yorker by Arthur C. Danto Every so often three writers come along who, it is obvious from the very beginning, are destined for greatness. They are great before anybody knows them, possibly the instant they are born. Read this book: The Unknown. It is the newest, latest, hippest, youngest, freshest, most happening, best, most outrageous, most intense and in a certain sense the most significant young prose in America, witheringly funny, grotesquely comprehensive, grimly smart, and so wrenching as to be moving, infinitely readable, a grand monstrous powerful thing, shadowy yet redemptive, unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, original and audacious, a vast comic epic and a study of the postmodern condition, hilarious, appalling, moving, subtle, wise, gritty, precisionist, enigmatic, and in this book lifelong themes of love and anger, family politics, sexuality, and the body of the city can be seen gathering in power and clarity, and it develops a freedom and psychic energy born triumphantly of well-wrought pain and determination, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. Two thumbs up. |
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