August Review 2014

Maybe like a few readers, I first got wind of Yates thru the Hollywood film version of Revolutionary Road.

This is the perfect intro to this great writer. His writing is a brutal lens on ordinary Americans - the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

His prose has a quality that cuts through to the heart of the matter and I found the stories had to be read in one sitting. It's a wonder why Yates isn't lauded as an American great, he deserves to be.

Give this book a chance and enter his world where the suffocation of existence has never been so well told..


Franco currently teaches at UCLA, between movies and writing, which demonstrates the versatile nature of this young hollywood property. There's a good novel struggling to get out of this book, maybe Franco is too close to the fire to avoid getting burnt. While there are snatches of good prose in this loosely connected short stories...the overall shape of this book is garbled and at times incoherent.

Worth a read if only to take an insiders view of Hollywood from a young man who certainly has a lot of talent

Siri has surpassed herself with this. It reads like an interesting non fiction, but no, this is a novel. This work is best enjoyed if you let Hustvedt transport you.
This is a novel about masks, levels of perception and there were times when Harriet Burden was as real to me as any dead artist. The writer has pulled off a masterpiece in fiction - in letting the reader be transformed into a willing piece in their universe. The mechanics of the book is an assortment of voices that knew the dead artist - grown up children, friends, critics and lovers and is nothing like I've read recently. Like 'What I loved' a deeply intellectual book that doesn't shut out the very well read. It's a very easy book to read and in a celeb obsessed world of skin deep; important in these times.

I would say this is the most important book I've read in some time as it challenges what we consider a novel, while challenging the ideas of gender in the aloof New York art scene. Like The Flamethrowers, by Kushner, it raises important questions of the female in art - so much the object rather than the artist . It's interesting that Harriet's husband is an art dealer who 'picks her up' - yet whose voice is only found once her husband dies and she is no longer a 20 something woman with striking breasts, but middle aged and invisible.

Genius.