Feast Days

"MacKenzie's economy is remarkable. He deftly captures how an outsider is only able to comprehend a country in pieces, assembling an incomplete puzzle over time. What holds this portrait of a marriage together, across time and across continents, is Emma's voice...MacKenzie's slender novel feels heavier than many novels twice its weight, dramatizing what it's like for the wealthy to live with the poor in the corner of their eye... In that sense, Feast Days is as much about America as it is about Brazil, as much about San Francisco as São Paulo."

"The novel of the ugly American living abroad has bloomed into a genre all its own, one I happen to devour with relish. Among my favorites are Charles Portis's Gringos, Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station and Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper. MacKenzie's second novel arrives as a worthy addition to that list...Expatriate novels often reveal more about their characters' homelands than they do about their presumably exotic destinations. Feast Days does likewise."

"MacKenzie's first person account of a woman in her late 20s living in São Paulo is one of the most convincing female voices this reviewer has come across....Despite a lack of action - most of the book centers on Emma's interior observations - there is a tension that anything could happen, that snap decisions have life-altering repercussions.... Feast Days is a sophisticated and astute story of expatriate life told from a truly convincing, captivating female voice."

"This brilliant novel has no time for platitudes or conventional, ankle-deep morality; it plunges us straight to the depths. I'm not sure I know another book that feels at once so disaffected and so full of longing, so expansive in its sympathy and so terrifying in its candor. Devastating, funny and wise, it's among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad."

"Ian MacKenzie writes about cities with the same verve and vigour as Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith.... MacKenzie has found a narrator who can voice many of the uncomfortable issues of our time: one cannot help but read on.... He is exploring the privilege of the white American abroad, and Feast Days delivers cutting criticism.... This book rings devastatingly true.... There is also a delight in words that is wonderful to read, a delicious speed to the prose. Feast Days is not a thriller, but reads a little like one, moving swiftly from one kind of experience to the next with brutal, dazzling effect."

"This highly anticipated new offering from MacKenzie poignantly contrasts the political breakdown of Brazil with the marital breakdown of a pair of expatriates."

"Feast Days is a wry, arresting, clear-eyed, unsentimental, utterly fresh take on the most urgent narrative questions there are. Class, money, politics, race, globalization, marriage, gender, reproduction, culture: Ian MacKenzie engages it all with such keen intelligence and wit your eyes feel new. Magnificent, deep, profound, and true."

"Feast Days is so much more than a novel. It's an all-consuming meditation on the modern condition, the search for rootedness in the ever-shifting worlds of our own creation, told by a writer so gifted with language that you forget who you are in the poetry of his prose."

"There is a sly, brooding intelligence at work in this novel, recalling for me the startling, highest times in American literature. MacKenzie is not just a great writer in the making--he's already there."

"Brilliant.... A pervasive sent of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, [is] conveyed in MacKenzie's unruffled, discerning prose. With it, MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction."

"Intelligent and atmospheric, Feast Days deftly limns the inner life of a foreigner whose own trajectory becomes increasingly bound up with the tensions and complexities of the society in which she has landed."

"Poignant and perceptive.... A satisfyingly complex look at life abroad."