The Newer World
Part Bildungsroman, part picaresque ... It’s an astonishing effect, especially when you consider the near-miracles Barry performs with language. In his hands it attains registers that can only be described as soaring; a vertiginous high wire of prose.
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Suffers from a peculiarly bloodless sense of composure in the face of historical outrage ... Confidently frictionless clemency ... To insist so floridly on your artistic liberty as a bulwark against tyranny, then use it simply to invent a survivor who invites us to reflect on slavery’s legacy by thinking, Oh, humanity: is that really what this great writer is ready to go to the gulag for?
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It’s an enjoyable journey, and Barry is so good at the voice and the sentence-level details — every page has pleasures from top to tail — that it’s easy to overlook issues with the bigger picture ... Still, things do pick up and gain strong direction once Tennyson joins the army. There we get to the moral heart of the story.
