Word: lairdã
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Daniel Williams, the young protagonist of Nick Laird??s “Utterly Monkey,” is bored with his life. Suffice it to say, the feeling for the reader is mutual...
Filled with sentences cut like bait, Laird??s novel is really just the facts. And still, it drags...
...think will happen does, and what we imagine cannot happen does not. The anxiety of global terrorism remains and the Irish economy and political system remain complex and marginalized. Danny Williams, for all his ingenuity and genuineness, cannot save the world. For all its excitement and all its fanfare, Laird??s book cannot escape its own depressing complacency...
...could pull any number of profound threads from Laird??s novel: that nostalgia is better left in the past, that anxiety only makes us anxious, that personal choices are inhibited by societal forces. But begin pulling at these threads and the whole novel unravels into a light farce on office life in London...
...skills are better reserved for poetry where silence and reticence work in tandem with a writer’s style. In “Utterly Monkey,” these awkward but poignant episodes are overwhelmed by the preposterous plot. For more than just the facts, try Laird??s first volume of poems “To a Fault,” or, better still, try his wife Zadie Smith’s debut novel “White Teeth...