Читать книгу Subtraction - Mary Robison - Страница 2

“There isn’t a writer working today who sees the world, or hears it, or inhabits it more fearlessly than Mary Robison. Reading Subtraction is falling in love with her—her voice, her verbs, the peculiar squinted view she has. This is the book we all wanted to write. It’s as smart as snakes. It’s a work of generosity and genius, of perfect timing and pitch, of immense sadness, and singular, driving hope. I can scarcely imagine anyone writing a novel half as stunning anytime soon.”

—FREDERICK BARTHELME,

author of There Must Be Some Mistake

“Robison raises sitcom wit to the level of real emotional situations, real comedy and real art with much the same perspicacity as Henry James did a century ago in ‘The Reverberator,’ his romantic satire on American media madness and the first novel to isolate the wisecrack or one-liner as the basic unit of American courtship conversation. But where James’ use of the wisecrack satirized his innocents abroad in the 1880s, Robison makes the one-liner emblematic of her characters’ ’90s hipness at home against a background of baffled emotional and intellectual drift.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Subtraction stands out as a high-wire act of the novel form—taut in expression yet rich with humanity, expertly crafted and unfairly neglected . . . In Subtraction Mary Robison creates a poignant, forceful tale of lovers in limbo. Her writing is rich with detail, lean with implication. When the tedium, the drudgery, the ephemera are sifted out, we’re left with the intense. Each word pulls its weight. Nothing is wasted.”

—The Millions