Reader Score
71%
71% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 9 reviews on
A haunting story of guilt and blame in the wake of a drowning, the first novel by the author of Spectacle
Susan Steinberg's first novel, Machine, is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers--both locals and wealthy out-of-towners--during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless.
"Steinberg shifts backward and forward in time, just as her prose shifts into a kind of poetry. The result is a glittering, knifelike reflection of despair through the eyes of a young woman, made richer by the fact that it's told in hindsight."--The New Yorker
"Steinberg's daring experiments with style and perspective make clear that such stock suspense isn't the point. The narrator's real quest is to discover whether a soul--hers, if it exists--can be saved."--The Atlantic "Steinberg's beautifully structured sentences and wholly original stylistic decisions give Machine a delicate intricacy that enhances the depth of the plot."--San Francisco Chronicle "[Steinberg's] prose is urgent and fluid, propelled by grammatical tension that transforms any odd pair of clauses into a flint and a stone--sometimes they grind together in subtle variation, and sometimes they spark into something new. The reader, unsure of which result to expect, is driven to attend to each word as if it might suddenly catch on fire."--The Nation "The narrative shifts, experimental structure and poetic language in Steinberg's hypnotic first novel capture the teen years with their shifting emotional tides and heightened awareness of class, gender, self and others."--BBC Culture