> Ingram seems most of all like the kind of first novel that ends up in a drawer and stays there until its author dies, whereupon, if the writer’s fully realized works have won over enough readers, it might get dragged out and published by the artist’s heirs. ^h27541306 > Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book: Look at this, it’s just not that hard to do. Three hundred pages with no chapter breaks, it swerves back and forth through time, from Nuzzi’s interviews with Donald Trump over the years to her combustible relationship with fellow annoying journalist Ryan Lizza to her alleged affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he was running for president himself. ^h27541310 > Writing, as with all art forms, is an act of noticing, and writers are judged on where and how deeply they choose to train their gaze. What’s with Baum? is an absolute failure of noticing. Place Allen in any room, he’ll see less than anyone else.” ^h27541314 > At times I approached the book, perhaps to preserve my own psychic integrity, as an avant-garde exercise in narrative unreliability, an experiment in the dizzying extremes of dramatic irony that I associate most with Charles Kinbote, the comically oblivious narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Again and again I found myself responding to some sententious lament about Silicon Valley’s lack of moral values by scrawling ‘You run Palantir!’ in the margin.” ^h27541320 > while reading Next to Heaven, I sometimes thought I could feel individual cells in my body trying to die ^h27541329