Rooms for Vanishing
Raises too many questions about the permeability of the timelines to be fully affecting ... Nadler spends so much time detailing the bureaucracy of ghost life that any sense of mystery is squashed ... Nadler writes in a register of formal mysticism that can be pleasantly sorrowful at times, overwrought at others ... Even a skilled writer like Nadler can’t always make fresh the tediousness of longing, or liberate the Altermans from reading as players in a post-Holocaust parable ... Still, there are moments of deep emotion in this ambitious novel.
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Mr. Nadler develops this melancholy notion with care and solemnity, stripping from his writing anything that might distract from its elegiac tone ... There is a stark, unfurnished quality to Rooms for Vanishing that makes its protracted length difficult to bear. The novel has the beauty of a dirge but not the substance of a story.
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[A] poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel ... Like many stories involving alternate realities, Nadler’s novel can get needlessly complex, but it compensates with exceptionally powerful moments.
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