"Respectfully, it's an odd thing to say that Coates's debut is essentially long and shallow, but compare him to some of the most masterful storytellers in the canon."
"I understand it's challenging in this day in age to just say one or the other for fear of being cancelled, but you don't need to bring in Octavia Butler or Toni Morrison in order to do so. None of the sentences highlighted here suggest the tonality of any of the writers you've compared his debut to, either, except for Stephen King — even then, the most comparable thing seems to be pace and plot, not the shape or substance of the novel." That's the top-rated comment at the NYT review of "The Water Dancer," the first novel by the high-profile nonfiction writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. I can see how the unsung fiction-writers of the world can be very easily irked when somebody who's already successful for some other reason suddenly presents himself as a novelist. The review is by Dwight Garner — I don't have a problem with the name Garner — and I was looking at the NYT list of his other reviews and I see he reviewed a novel that I happen to have ju...