The question of contemporary masculinity (in relationship to women as well as the burdens of father/son relationships) is a major current in the novel and gives it an anxiety that is relatable and suspenseful. Think Adam Gordon (of Atocha) fifteen years on. Like Lerner, Knausgaard, and Shields, it's a contemporary autobiographical novel.Beachy-Quick has written a contemporary fairy tale that's rich with allusion-fans of novels that gesture to the books that inspired them will happily see glimpses of Blake, Melville, Proust, and Sebald, and readers without those referents will be carried along ...
The question of contemporary masculinity (in relationship to women as well as the burdens of father/son relationships) is a major current in the novel and gives it an anxiety that is relatable and suspenseful. Think Adam Gordon (of Atocha) fifteen years on.
Like Lerner, Knausgaard, and Shields, it's a contemporary autobiographical novel.Beachy-Quick has written a contemporary fairy tale that's rich with allusion-fans of novels that gesture to the books that inspired them will happily see glimpses of Blake, Melville, Proust, and Sebald, and readers without those referents will be carried along by his poet's sense of language and the gradual unraveling of the mysteries that make up the engine of the plot.
Beachy-Quick's interest in story isn't just in terms of influence; he's also engaged with the question of how the stories we tell ourselves alter our realities. The reshaping of everyday life by the force of thought.
Beachy-Quick is well-established as a poet and essayist and this, his first novel, benefits from that (you can see a similar phenomenon in how Ben Lerner's move to fiction was of interest to readers) 
