Paradise Logic
Wildly inventive ... With an impressive ear for rhythm, Kemp’s writing shines throughout this imaginative novel.
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Absurd ... It’s a bleak assessment of the landscape for heterosexual women, and one that seems to match Kemp’s own ... The problem with this is that it creates a satire with missing teeth, a hilarious romp that points out the precarity, ridiculousness, and violence of patriarchy without a glint of a way out. I’ll grant that it’s not the task of this novel—or any, for that matter—to deliver an ideologically consistent praxis. But mourn with me, for a moment, the absence of hope, the death of agency ... The joke becomes tiresome when it drones on for too long ... Paradise Logic is also a puzzle—a Dream Life–style game about the trap of patriarchy, and the absolute torture and rapture of being a young woman at 23. Nabokovian? Not quite. But enough to send the e-girl in a more interesting direction.
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Revolves around a refreshingly human conceit ... But Reality...is not fleshy or funny enough to sustain Kemp’s 240-odd pages. Hampered by aesthetic flourishes like smiley and sad faces punctuating paragraphs and an omniscient voice’s urges to 'Read on, man,' Kemp’s prose is less provocative than cloying ... If Reality is the last hetero-optimist, then Kemp never joins her in her enthusiasm, maintaining an ironic distance and, crucially, some plausible deniability.
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