I bought Brotherly Love, a discounted, yet signed, copy from the remaindered section of the bookstore where I used to work. At the time I was enamored by Pete Dexter, whose books Train and Paris Trout I had recently read. Both of those books are spare and menacing, at times brutally violent, but done in a masterful way. Brotherly Love is like those books, but to call the book spare is an understatement. Dexter takes his time – most of the book, really – fleshing out the main characters, cousins Peter and Michael Flood from a Philadelphia gangster family. As the plot slowly develops – or comes to a boil, one might say – it becomes clear that Peter wants out. But of course, Michael and his band of hoods keep dragging him back in. In Brotherly Love, Dexter doesn’t quite plumb the emotional depths of his characters as he does so effectively in Paris Trout and Train, and the reader is left with a book that feels empty and characters that feel doomed from page one.
A Review of Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter
In Alexandra Tanner’s ‘Worry,’ Illness Is the Status Quo
In a novel where sisterhood entails constant conflict, illness provides an unexpected emotional salve.
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At Long Last, a Translation Worthy of ‘Pedro Páramo’
The latest translation of 'Pedro Páramo' is a mystifying work, in the dual sense that it is confounding and that its language possesses an almost mystical quality.
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The Collaborative Alchemy of W.G. Sebald’s Photographs
By rephotographing the material Sebald brought to him, Michael Brandon-Jones played a critical role in helping the writer achieve a tonal consistency between text and image.
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Kelly Link’s Romantic Imagination
Though Link’s stories often keep closer bedfellows with Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, her novel is pulpier and more bathetic, in some ways a piece of straight fantasy.
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The Everyday Horror of ‘Other Minds and Other Stories’
In someone else’s hands, these stories might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing.
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The Violent Truths of ‘Brutalities’
The impulse to simplify the complicated nature of touch, argues Margo Steines, is not just an intellectual but an ethical failure.
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The Truthful Distortions of ‘The MANIAC’
'The MANIAC' is a kind of triptych, presenting us with the conception, painful birth, and exponential growth of the digital computer and its own disquieting offspring, artificial intelligence.
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The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas
'Shimmering Details' is a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling.
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