06/15/2018
"Alice Mattison’s novels often revolve around an intense friendship between women in a leftish milieu. So does her latest, which offers many of the pleasures of those earlier works. A careful observer of gesture and language, Mattison writes warmly about her characters. The inhabitants of this novel all struggle to live ethical lives."
New York Times Book Review
"Mattison tells several stories in Conscience , and watching them grow and intersect is one of the greatest pleasures of the book. The shifting perspective works well, as a chorus of “I”s helps build a collective sense of the collateral damage of the war and the noisy overlap of friends, family, and lovers that make up a community. The female characters in Conscience are part of a long line of women — working women, sexual women, family women, thinking women — whose lives Mattison has lovingly captured and explored. Mattison gives us an intimate portrait of the struggles and sacrifices of the men and women who protested against the war in Vietnam. She also reminds us of what it is to have, and act on, a conscience, what it is to make a choice and accept the consequences."
Los Angeles Review of Books
"A complex, challenging, riveting new Alice Mattison novel."
"A novel that’s a lot like life: jumbled and challenging and wonderfully real. Conscience will please those who complain that so much literary fiction is a little too neat, ironical or even adolescent. Indeed, Mattison never hesitates to let her characters worry away at what’s troubling them, cycling back over their own shame and others’ slights in a way that seems wholly, sometimes maddeningly, realistic. But the real triumph of this ruminative novel is that it transports us back to a period when exercising one’s conscience was a national emergency. And then Mattison slyly insists that we acknowledge the moral complexity of our own era with its own equally urgent demands."
"Conscience will be a bittersweet read for many who remember the Vietnam War era. Using two narrative strands, related by three richly complex narrators, the book explores a half century in emotional and political depth."
New York Journal of Books
"Friendship tested in the crucible of political upheaval fascinates Mattison, a writer of extraordinary psychological acuity and crisp wit. It shaped her previous novel, When We Argued All Night , and comes to even stronger fruition in this riveting tale. Mattison’s engrossing exploration of diverse matters of conscience is dynamic, precise, many-layered, funny, ambushing, and provocative."
"Friendship tested in the crucible of political upheaval fascinates Mattison, a writer of extraordinary psychological acuity and crisp wit. It shaped her previous novel, When We Argued All Night , and comes to even stronger fruition in this riveting tale. Mattison’s engrossing exploration of diverse matters of conscience is dynamic, precise, many-layered, funny, ambushing, and provocative."
A novel that’s a lot like life: jumbled and challenging and wonderfully real. Conscience will please those who complain that so much literary fiction is a little too neat, ironical or even adolescent. Indeed, Mattison never hesitates to let her characters worry away at what’s troubling them, cycling back over their own shame and others’ slights in a way that seems wholly, sometimes maddeningly, realistic. But the real triumph of this ruminative novel is that it transports us back to a period when exercising one’s conscience was a national emergency. And then Mattison slyly insists that we acknowledge the moral complexity of our own era with its own equally urgent demands.
Mattison is a master of human relationships, capturing their complexities and nuances with wit and precision.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [praise for Alice Mattison]
Mattison's observations are so minutely compelling that each one feels like a shiny object, once lost but found unexpectedly.
The New Yorker [praise for Alice Mattison]
Alice Mattison is a charmer. She's one of those uncommon writers who are genuinely tickled by the ids and egos they commit to paper, and her characters bask—rather than squint—in the sunshine of her affectionate scrutiny.
The New York Times Book Review [praise for Alice Mattison]
2018-05-15
