ISBN: 9780060953713

Francine Prose

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"This is among the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time and, once started...I couldn't stop turning the pages until there were none left....What makes Prose's novel so good is...the prose. (After a dozen books, one can imagine how tired she must feel of such wordplay.) Throughout, her sentences flow effortlessly, neat and slightly dry, sometimes a little tart; they offer civilized pleasure....You shouldn't expect this to be some major work of modern American fiction, but it is zingy literary entertainment..., and the pages will fly by as you read them."

Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 03/26/2000

"Happily, Prose neither wholly condemns either character nor absolves them of their multiple weaknesses and errors. Rather, she charts the limits of their visions and the chaotic, destructive results of their actions, and lets the reader be the judge. It is this intricacy, this ever-shifting, boglike moral ground, that gives the novel its comic power and its depth....Where Prose is weaker is in her rendering of some of the minor characters. While Prose's intentions here are clearly satiric, the renderings feel overly familiar and cartoonish, parodies that remain too one-note, too stretched and simplified to be convincing....The result is that while her exploration of the foibles of political correctness is occasionally funny, sometimes the results fall flat. In the end, though, this is a novel more about one man's crashing journey toward a new life than it is about contemporary academic mores."

Elizabeth Graver, Chicago Tribune Books, 04/23/2000