Once you’ve published your own review of a book, it’s always a bit vertiginous to read the same book reviewed elsewhere.  Surely almost every critic writing on deadline wonders if he’s missed something important, emphasized something trivial, or just plain judged a book wrong. When the ‘elsewhere’ in question is the mighty TLS, one of the few remaining genuine heavyweights in the literary journalism world, the anxiety is just that much more tingly.

So we turned with added attention to the 30 October issue of the TLS to take in their response to Pete Dexter’s latest novel Spooner, which is reviewed at length in our November issue by Sam Sacks. As great as the TLS is, their fiction reviews can sometimes be, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and when it comes to American fiction, their writers often seem to be working through anger therapy rather than examining a writer’s work.

Fortunately (for all concerned, really), the reviewer this time is T. O. Treadwell, as steady and first-rate a critic as ever sidled up to a typewriter, and Dexter’s book gets an entirely fair assessment, complete with quotable lines. About Calmer Ottoson, for instance, the true-blue  father-figure to the novel’s protagonist, Treadwell writes, “To draw a virtuous character without sentiment is notoriously difficult, and Dexter’s success here is not the least of his novel’s achievements.”

Most of the critics who’ve looked at Spooner have dwelt at length on the novel’s autobiographical aspects (Sacks makes a rather pointed reference to “the canny deflections of the memoirist”), and Treadwell – whose review is not long – does likewise, at one point mentioning, “One of the attractions of the fictional memoir must be the opportunity it offers for settling old scores, and Spooner contains a splendid range of monsters, many of them brought to satisfyingly gruesome nemesis.”

Treadwell’s verdict is kind: “Pete Dexter has transmuted the vicissitudes of a turbulent life into an accomplished novel.” To learn a great deal more about Dexter’s writing career in general and Spooner in specific – and to see what final verdict Sacks himself hands down on the final product, click on over to our November issue. And then tell us what you think, of course.