Tenderness

Reviews

Tenderness is a passionate, epic joy. It's a paean to artistic imagination and freedom, and also to the messy complexity of humanity. The characters leap from the page with astonishing life that is all the more impressive given their historical fame. MacLeod's prose is a masterclass - gripping, lyrical, witty, razor-sharp and filled with, yes, tenderness. I will never forget it. Tenderness is a triumph and it will conquer your heart. Stunning, illuminating, but also, profoundly moving. What a triumph of skill and imagination is this powerful, moving, brilliant novel! I’ve never read anything quite like TENDERNESS, and I doubt I ever will again. This is more than a book about a book; this is a book about living — about really living, at the most dangerous and beautiful edges of the human experience. I stand in awe of Alison MacLeod. She is a novelist operating at the peak of her powers — no less a genius than the master whose work she has so lovingly and shrewdly explored here. She moves across time and space like a wizard, wrapping up fact within fiction so magically that you can’t find a seam anywhere. TENDERNESS is an utterly captivating read, and I came away from it with this astonished thought: There’s nothing this writer can’t do. An ambitious sprawl of a book, splendidly extreme in its magnitude, yet always elegant; a defence of complicated thinking and embodied life. [An] ambitious blend of research, guesswork, and fabrication. Glorious and arresting ... A widescreen novel. This novel has an expansive reach. Humans are contradictory, time folds in on itself, and literature informs life. Quotes from Lawrence’s writing, his contemporaries’ poems, and even this novel itself are layered through the book as if seen through a scrim behind the novel’s primary text. ’Every story,’ MacLeod argues in an afterword, ‘is a story of ‘What If.’ … unexpectedly convincing … against all odds, it [works]. Magnificent . . . MacLeod covers an astonishingly broad range of incidents, eras, and themes in vivid prose, and depicts Lawrence’s supporters and opponents with equal insight and sympathy. . . . A triumphant demonstration of that power, this places MacLeod among the best of contemporary novelists. Brilliant . . . MacLeod evokes Lawrence's world beautifully, and her Kennedy subplot works shockingly well, as does the students' relationship, which evokes the passion that powered all of Lawrence's work . . . brimming with deeply felt life. As sublimely crafted as a novel could ever be. Tenderness is an intricate, mesmerising tapestry of love and regret, prudery and desire, loneliness and togetherness, loyalty and betrayal, and the enigmas and conundrums involved in the art of committing these experiences to the page. Alison MacLeod has bored deep into significant cultural fault-lines of the twentieth century: D.H. Lawrence's grappling with Edwardian England's psychological timidity; America's moment of political optimism with the Kennedys; the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. She has disentangled connections--roots--between them and their participants, and emerged with a great sweeping symphony of a novel. Gorgeously written and meticulously conceived. A hugely daring, intrigue-packed, decade-jumping doorstopper that teasingly blends fiction and actuality with wit and panache. Tenderness has all the elements of great historically based fiction, from vivid characters to resonant contemporary concerns, and it succeeds in delivering a powerful story beautifully told. Time stretches from 1915 to 1960 in an elaborate braid of real historical events and characters' private activities and thoughts … [A] dance between historic fact, plausible maybes and imagination Expand reviews