Literary Significance and Reception
Reviews have praised the novels realism, believable characters and dialogue, sense of place and the complexity of the novel. The Guardian picked out Pelecanos ability to provide authentic voices for his characters but criticised instances where the narrative voice was inconsistent with the reality of the character. Other reviewers have commented that the gory detail and social realism may be offputting for some readers. The New York Times commented that the blaming of some of the characters behaviour on the absence of father figures may be an oversimplification.
Read more about this topic: Soul Circus (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise—nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.”
—Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)