The Washington Post weighs in on Carolyn Parkhurst’s The Nobodies Album, featured yesterday on the blog:
“A number of ambitious and winning novels have been written about novelists themselves, from Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" to Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and Carol Shields's "Unless." Add to the list now D.C. author Carolyn Parkhurst's "The Nobodies Album." Not just a book about a novelist in action, it's also a meditation on writing itself and on the curious intersections between the imagined world and the real one.
“…the book succeeds in probing nuanced issues of guilt and innocence through an intricate collage of memories and musings, with excerpts from Octavia's novels and passages from Milo's lyrics. Milo's band is Pareidolia, defined here as "the human tendency to find meaning where there is none," but Octavia is more optimistic about purpose and meaning and about answering some emotionally richer questions. How should you raise a child? How do you deal with grief? What if you make a mistake? Or many? Is redemption elusive?
“Those are some real mysteries, well worth grappling with.”
Read the rest here.
