I can't wait

to read Claire Messud's new novel, which gets a great review from Sara Eckel at the Voice. I have only read The Last Life, not her other two, but I thought it was wonderfully good: there's something reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst, he and Messud both look back style-wise to the European rather than simply Anglophone nineteenth-century novel but without even a hint of the nostalgic costume-drama-ishness that afflicts so many writers who borrow the techniques of realism for comparable ends.