Three Delays is so stunningly composed, so wildly, implausibly, excessively written, that it makes the entire shelf of novels from the last generation superfluous. The story? The characters devour the story. They mainline the narrative into collapsing veins, they rise up out of locales like the Everglades, the Mexican countryside, Istanbul, and flatten these settings with their apparently unending (since death doesn’t make a dent) cycles of desire, contempt, violence (and repartee). True, events transpire in order to justify 352 pages of text, and these events, such as they are, escalate from inadvisable to hair-raising to enough to cause copious weeping in a reader. And yet, in the end, besides Alice and Billy and their rapacious longing, there is little in this book that consists of incident or setting. There is little but the incantatory, rebel angel prose that has made Charlie Smith a consummate outsider, and also one of the very best prose writers in contemporary letters. Want to read about how harrowing and essential love can really be? Dip in here. Be made alive.
—Rick Moody, seething, one hopes not hyperbolically, into his Believer review, on Charlie Smith’s Three Delays, Smith’s first novel in over a decade, his sixth, after poetry volumes, soon into my hands, I must, thusly, as he says, rapacious.
