Book reviews roundup: The Green Road, Adventures in Human Being and Mr West

Some reviewers seemed to struggle for the words to adequately express the brilliance of Anne Enright’s latest novel, The Green Road. “Enright’s prose glitters and gleams like sunlit water,” rhapsodised Charlotte Heathcote in the Sunday Express. “She is that rare thing: a very, very good writer,” was Emma Townshend’s more straightforward verdict in the Independent on Sunday. “Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr faded to shadow. I was not distracted from reading a single word.” High praise indeed. For the Observer’s Alex Preston, however, the book would have worked better as a series of short stories. “The reunion at the end of the novel, and the dramatic disappearance that shuttles us through the final pages, feel like unnecessary MacGuffins, put there to appease the conventions of plot.” Cristina Patterson, writing in the Sunday Times, was captivated. “The surgical precision of her writing can also make you feel that she can, in Wordsworth’s words, ‘see into the life of things’. There’s a singing simplicity to it that can tug at your heart.” But she, too, grappled to find quite the right word for Enright. “You can’t really call a woman a master. A mistress seems to be something else. But I think Anne Enright is a master. She has certainly produced a masterly work.”

Garlands were predicted for Gavin Francis’s “cultural map of the body” Adventures in Human Being. “So enthralling and so well written that it should win its own clutch of prizes,” wrote Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times, who hailed the “frequent brilliance of Francis’s prose, which can move seamlessly from clinical exactitude to poetry”. In the Times, Melanie Reid described the book as “clever, strangely beautiful and definitely not for the squeamish”, remarking that, just as neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm was shortlisted for many prizes, “Gavin Francis’s book deserves the same.” Robin McKie wrote in the Observer that: “In other hands, Adventures in Human Being might well have become cluttered with cliche, detail or sentimentality but Francis has a lightness of touch that helps him avoid these pitfalls.”

High-minded readers may be alarmed to note that the influence of the first couple of pop culture, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, has been beating an inexorable path from the pages of Heat magazine into the literary sections. Earlier this year saw the publication of Sam Riviere’s poetry collection inspired by the pair, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, and it seems that was just the beginning. Selfish, Kardashian’s 350-page epic book of selfies, which is riding high on the bestseller charts on both sides of the Atlantic, was treated to a lengthy and enthusiastic review in the Telegraph by Riviere, who compared the Kardashians to the Brontës: “a family of creative women, in the business of conducting narratives in which men come and go, but female relationships remain constant and meaningful”. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran a substantial review of Mr West, the first collection by the poet Sarah Blake, inspired by Kanye’s relationship with his mother, Dr Donda West. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the lure of online clicks might have had something to do with it, particularly as the reviewer, Andrew DuBois, was not convinced of the collection’s literary merit. “Mr West is a book that is in utterly good faith. That doesn’t quite make it a good book, however.”