We Can Report Them
 Cover of the 1st edition | |
| Author | Michael Brodsky |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Laurie Dolphin Design |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Post-modern fiction |
| Publisher | Four Walls Eight Windows |
Publication date | 1999 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 340 |
| ISBN | 978-1568581446 |
We Can Report Them is Michael Brodsky's sixth novel. The novel intertwines death and creation, centering on the making of a commercial glorifying a serial killer's last days. The commercial's director must also deal with two terminally ill patients.
Reception
Brodsky has his immense gifts under control, and real madness is allowed to shine forth
— Edmund Carlevale, The Boston Book Review, 11/1999
While the stylistic excesses force the reader into a peculiarly tenacious reading zone, We Can Report Them is finally agreeable as it is a novel that resonates.
— Alan Tinkler, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 2000, Vol. 20, Issue 2
[E]ven when the story is intelligible... it doesn't much matter, except as a sounding board for various abstract concepts.
— Kristin Eliasberg, New York Times,10/10/1999
Brodsky belongs to the avant-garde school of novelists who dispense with plot in favor of the referential possibilities of language. ... Critical opinion is divided on Brodsky's 10 previous works of fiction, and the writer has alternately been read as a brilliant prose stylist and an off-putting obscurantist. Though the comic density of his language here yields some stunning verbal pyrotechnics, it just as frequently thickens into unintelligibility.
— ?, Publishers Weekly, 9/1999
Some critics praise Brodsky, but this reviewer agrees with Charles Salzberg: "Language...is supposed to communicate, not alienate; enlighten, not confuse."[1]
— Jim Dwyer, Cal State Chico, Library Journal, 1999
References
- ^ New York Times, review of Southernmost and other stories, 3/9/1997