Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
Impressive ... A truly delightful story ... It took me a few pages to latch onto the arrhythmic, almost jazzy flow of the novel, but the stylistic turbulence is appropriate for a life so thoroughly upended ... Maggie is unfettered by allusions to current events and so comes off as almost timeless ... That perennial quality also shines through in the narrator’s determination to become 'someone who can separate her life from her family’s and still survive.' It’s maybe not the easiest or cheeriest lesson to learn, but it’s an invaluable one that Yee shares with aplomb in this heartfelt debut.
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Intelligent and playful ... This tight little novel...with its resentment-tinged wit (reminiscent of Heartburn by Nora Ephron) has truth woven into every paragraph. I’d go as far as to say it’s the best divorce novel I’ve read for years.
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Yee’s buzzy debut is startlingly fleet ... The narrative is made up of loosely structured prose fragments — rarely longer than a page or two — in the vein of Renata Adler and Jenny Offill ... Comic ... Yee’s prose has a meandering, conversational rhythm, and reading Maggie feels pleasurably like clicking through the back archives of a webcomic or lingering over lunch wine with an old friend ... It’s risky to design a novel featuring all these gaps, like air pockets keeping it afloat ... Gives a sense of talent kept in reserve for some other, later occasion — of an author wary of spending it all in one place. I hope Yee opens the vault. The clouds look heavy these days.
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