Review of Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley

Check out my review of Davies’s spectacular debut novel at the Brooklyn Rail. Here’s an excerpt from it:
Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley is a film buff’s, no, cosmopolitan’s, no, epicurean’s, no, literary aesthete’s guide to late ’60s Paris; and it’s a kind of loving homage to unfinished films, their reverberations of nostalgia, memory, and obsession; but it’s also a novel where dizzying erudition is set in counterpoint with comic set-pieces, where robust language, mediated by a penetrating understanding of character, takes over every page (there are even expansive extrapolations on etymologies). There’s a buoyancy to the style here and an easy abandonment of straightforward storytelling, resulting in a beautiful prose object, that is, a story told “in the best possible way.”