Waxwings - Softcover

"A tour de force. . . . In its comedy and melancholy appreciation of the human predicament in the new millenium, this novel goes a long way toward making it bearable." --"The Washington Post Book World ""A generous, affirming novel. . . . Terrific." "--The New York Times Book Review" "A keenly observant, ironic, yet at heart sympathetic exploration of what America has promised and provided." --"Chicago Tribune " "[D]exterously tacks between tragedy and comedy. [Raban's] representations of materialism and the dot.com working environment are dead-on, and his descriptions of the hopes and fears of parents and spouses are heart-rending." --"St. Louis Post Dispatch " "Stylishly smooth, descriptively compelling and tragically funny. . . . This is Seattle as Dickens might describe it." --"The Seattle Times" ""Waxwings" . . . is hugely satisfying; buzzing with life from Seattle's dotcom industry, sharpened by domestic intrigue and then alarm as the protagonist's life begins to fall apart." --"Independent on Sunday" "The best novel yet about the dot-com era. . . . Raban's snapshots . . . are fall-over funny. [He] nails our short-lived intoxication and hints at the hangover to follow." --"Time Out NewYork" "Raban's pages . . . sing with dazzling phrases and fresh insights." --"Seattle Post-Intelligencer" "Sharper (and a lot faster) than The Bonfire of the Vanities, [Waxwings] may well be one of the best accounts ever written of an American era." --"Kirkus Reviews" (starred) "It's a testament to Raban's control that he can integrate personal and public catastrophes so deftly in this witty novel. . . . He prods us to consider that we're living in a periodthat makes us all somehow foreigners." --"Christian Science Monitor " "Raban's views, ironic and humane, are always acute; always illuminating. His prose - agile, musky, particular - is a treasure." --"The Guardian "(London) "Marvelous. . . . As with [Tom] Wolfe's extravaganzas, Waxwings teems with juicy, funny characters emblematic of their time and place . . . but, unlike Wolfe, Raban knows how to bridge the gap between the broad social canvas of satire and the interior life of delicate rounded characters." --"Entertainment Weekly " "Waxwings has great amplitude and intelligence . . . a wide-ranging, pungent, sharply observed novel." --"Raleigh News Observer " "A delicious social comedy . . . "Waxwings "is also an elegant meditation on immigrant America." --"The" "Boston Globe " "Generous, funny and beautifully written . . . Waxwings is extraordinarily rich and expertly paced and arranged. The social range of the novel is enormous; the characterizations acute. Every character, however incidental, has a voice." --"The" "Columbus Dispatch " "Raban's specialty is the sly, unsparing metaphor and jarring observation, and he's at the top of his form in Waxwings. Yet he perceives his adopted homeland without American Beauty-style snarkiness or intellectual dispassion a la DeLillo, displaying instead the compassion and bracing honesty of an ambivalent lover." --"Village Voice Literary Supplement ""Waxwings" "stimulates the reader both emotionally and intellectually, gently tapping at the funny bone while giving us characters we care about. . . . It is a solid example of contemporary literature: entertainment with a message about modern society and themodern individual." --"The Orlando Sun-Sentinel ""Imagine Evelyn Waugh with a social conscience and, perhaps, a tad more humanity. . . . Enormously pleasing. . . . Wonderful fun, as lively as anything out there." --"The Hartford Courant "

Moving, exquisitely written and hugely entertaining, Waxwings captures the landscape and life of contemporary America, confirming Jonathan Raban as one of our very finest writers