Martin John Reviews
“It is a testament to the novelist’s skill that such a hard read is not necessarily difficult. While Schofield has digested all of postmodernism’s tics and tricks, her writing is fundamentally empathetic, and the various interventions feel like necessary attempts to render the unspeakable, rather than as flashy mystifications of a straightforward narrative.”
“Simply brilliant. With its discomfiting portraiture, dazzling brain-puzzle of a storytelling technique, and utter assurance, Martin John easily matches the tremendous promise of Malarky, Schofield’s debut.”
“The weird and recursive prose makes the language makes the language startlingly vivid, and Martin John’s fractured narrative perspective is positively adrenal.”
“Pick it up if you are enthralled by what the novel with its variable and elastic form can do as Schofield pushes the boundaries in careful calibrations of narrative structure and language that bites.”
“Eschewing both moral didacticism and easy narrative conventions, Schofield offers a slow and careful reveal of the troubled thoughts and actions of a sexual perpetrator.”
“Anakana Schofield has eloquently captured the inner life of a hapless pervert — of whom there are many in our society, but who we little understand.”
“For a novel about a sexual deviant, Martin John is positively breezy. It’s humorous in places, fast-paced, its momentum spur”red on by the arrows separating the text’s sections, part of the book’s overall transit motif
“Schofield’s first achievement is to burrow into Martin John’s rackety mind. Her second crucial achievement is to turn this unsettling apprehension into a necessary, extraordinary act of empathy.”
“eerie and elliptical…In the cadenced, hypnotic style of Gertrude Stein, Ms. Schofield renders his consciousness through a kind of staccato anti-poetry…The result is a grotesquely memorable character pursued through his mazes of routines and obsessions and rationalizations…”