Surprise: Watts’s novel is unfairly freighted with this allusion to its distant, white ancestor. If you know Fitzgerald’s story intimately, it might be intriguing, in some minor, academic way, to trace the lines of influence on her work, but in general that’s a distraction. Watts has written a sonorous, convoluted novel that’s entirely her own … [the] plural narrator, knowing and wry, is just one of the novel’s wealthy pleasures. Without yoking herself to some cumbersome Greek chorus, Watts has invented a communal voice that’s infinitely elastic, capable of surveying the whole depressed town or lingering tenderly in a grieving mother’s mind … Little happens in this novel in any established sense, but it seems constantly in motion because Watts is so captivating a writer … All of this is conveyed in a prose style that renders the common language of casual speech into natural poetry, blending intimate conversation with the rhythms of gossip, town legend, even song lyrics … What Watts has done here is more captivating than another retread about the persistence of a crook’s dream. She’s created an indelible story about the substance of a woman’s life.
