Review: Vanilla Bright Like Eminem by Michel Faber

Today, in January Magazine’s fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Vanilla Bright Like Eminem by Michel Faber. Says Leach:

Some years ago my husband and I read Jane Smiley’s Greenlanders, her attempt at Norse Saga. Character after character abruptly died by falling through the ice. It became a joke between us: whatever happened to so and so? He fell through the ice and died.

The characters in Michel Faber’s Vanilla Bright are about to fall through the ice and die. A very few survive their falls, somehow bobbing to the surface, stunned, badly foundering as loved ones stand by, numbly unable to assist.

Faber is rare in that he moves easily across genres, which become, beneath his amazing pen, visitations to places we are hard pressed to name.

The full review is here. January Magazine’s 2002 interview with Faber is here.