Category: reviews

In the Boston Globe, Jon Garelick has written a generous review of my novel, in which he notes that “Crain is his own meta-critic, making literary analysis a convincing part of Jacob’s narrative.”

A couple of months ago, in the spring, Rich Fahle conducted an interview with me about the novel at New York’s Book Expo, and Fahle’s new website, Bibliostar TV, has just released a video of the interview.

There’s a somewhat mixed review of my novel in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Aaron Hamburger writes that he wishes there were more of a plot and that I had written explicit sex scenes. He praises the “lovely, sure-handed prose,” however.

Over all, I’ve been tremendously fortunate in the critical reception of the book so far, in its quantity and its tone, and I remain very grateful for it.

For example, also today, Kirkus has published an interview with me by Jaime Netzer, who has done a very artful job of letting me ramble on while somehow pulling together a story about the role that the critical impulse plays in the writing of a novel.

And in Slate, Jane Hu has written a generous and thoughtful essay that looks into, among other things, the novel’s debt to Auden, its lack of a conventional plot, and the question of its relation to postmodernism.