The Newlyweds
After I finished the book, I was still unsure whether [Freudenberger] had managed to communicate anything at all. . . .  Everything, it seems, needs documenting, but instead of using detail to enrich the complicated circumstances of her characters or insinuate symbolic relevance, the accumulation of detail ends up polluting the tone with a sort of faux wonder and naivete, an imagined otherness that allows Freudenberger to revel in her every banal observation. —Jessica Joffe