Something Rotten
Reuben’s plight feels urgent ... The real fun of Something Rotten, though, lies in the concentric deceptions that Reuben and Cecilie both uncover and perpetrate. At heart, this is a book about deceit, about double-crossing and discovering the difference between abstract and tangible truth.
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Lipstein is such a gifted writer that he shifts nimbly between Reuben’s and Cecilie’s inner worlds ... But Lipstein’s very talents as a storyteller render some of the book’s clunkier notes that much more discordant. Reuben’s cancellation, and the downfall of his career, is a tantalizing premise for a novel. But when we finally find out what he did, it’s a bit of a letdown ... At other points, Reuben engages in morally relativistic, ends-justify-the-means thinking that falls short of profundity ... Lipstein, for all his wonderful writing, dispatches with the possible complexities of his narrative a little too breezily.
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A humorous, well-paced portrait of a marriage and of lives in transition ... If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s that the women come across almost as ciphers. Although the move is back to Cecilie’s country, the emotional journey is Reuben’s.
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