From Publishers Weekly Respected poet Sheck delivers a classic poet's first novel, a long, polyphonic, often directionless sprawl of unconventional narrative. In her poetry, Sheck has striven to mimic the kinesis of the modern mind: an entrapped being, self-consciously at odds with its literary predecessors. But in the shift to fiction, much of her trademark momentum is lost and her fervent brilliance stretched thin. The book takes the perspective of Frankenstein's monster and interweaves his œnotesР’Сњ on the human race with fictionalized letters of his creator, author Mary Shelley. (Sheck imagines Shelley to have met the monster as a little girl, sitting by her mother's grave.) It's an unwieldy project that, like the monster's body, feels off-kilter and ill-proportioned, while its organizational scheme (by topics of the monster's interest, such as John Cage's prepared piano or the ethics of genetic privacy) can make the reading experience feel rather encyclopedic. Still, Sheck's effulgent, elegant wisdom is impossible to deny. She may not yet be a storyteller, but she is a superb lyricist, and in this new work, she comes across as a fearless philosopher for our times. (June)
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From The New Yorker Rather as Michael Cunningham used “Mrs. Dalloway” in “The Hours,” the poet Laurie Sheck places Mary Shelley′s “Frankenstein” at the center of a varied and obsessively researched narrative canvas, encompassing such matters as early explorations of the Arctic Circle and the untimely deaths of Shelley′s mother, half sister, small children, and husband. The most successful set piece is an uncanny fable that portrays Frankenstein′s monster as an enigmatic but compassionate spirit who briefly appears to Shelley in her girlhood, takes umbrage at the violence of her novel, and survives into the present to observe the work′s long life in popular culture. Not all the digressions are equally gripping, but Sheck provides a provocative metaphor for spiritual and technological crisis: in the last pages, a being without identity cowers in a squalid room, hunting the Internet for a trace of its creator.
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