Reviews for Neighboring Lives

The average rating for Neighboring Lives based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-10 00:00:00 Robert Alexander from 2005. Another big thick historical novel, I particularly enjoyed reading Neighboring Lives, by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor so soon after reading David Lodge's new book (scroll down) as it similarly details historical fact with fictional embellishments - those hidden conversations, assignations, and meetings we wish we'd been a fly on the wall for. Where Lodge imagined Henry James, Naylor and Disch focus on the pre-Raphaelites: Rossetti, Morris, Carlyle, Holman-Hunt, among others. Greatly enjoyed it. Extremely well-written. Man, did it take me back to grad school. Got to pull some pre-Raph poetry off the shelves and walk my academic memory lane. This Thomas Disch guy - he's some kind of crazy Renaissance man. The first book I read for him was pure sci fi - and spooky spooky sci fi at that. Now this very intensely literary, academic, imagining. Is there anything he can't write?

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-16 00:00:00 Will Bodenheimer Here's historical fiction centered on Chelsea in the 1830-60's, detailed and daily in its delights, Thomas Carlyle and his Jenny, the Rossettis and their crowd, Swinburne and Whistler with a glimpse of Turner. Domestic, quiet, the most extravagant events of a destroyed manuscript, mistresses and scandal embedded in the inexorable movement of days. The texture is soft and muted, with a whiff of the reeking Thames. You enter lives that have a great deal of persuasive ordinariness about them however notable the names. I wonder if Spall in his extensive research for the movie Mr. Turner happened upon this book? For atmosphere, for the time and place, I think the novel hard to match--a key to a past world.