BOOK REVIEW

Discoveries abound in this debut novel set in Japan

By Amanda Katz

March 8, 2010

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If you read a lot of debut fiction, there’s a subgenre you eventually come to dread: the semiautobiographical first novel. For every “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’’ there are seemingly thousands of dreary plods through some nobody’s tender years, rendered in artless prose and structured more like a meandering dorm-room confession than a novel. (Full article: 630 words)