Critics were suspicious when Emma Cline shot to fame in 2016, at age twenty-seven, with her debut novel, The Girls. James Wood’s New Yorker review exemplifies the conventional wisdom on Cline that still carries to this day. He wrote that her style “can be too brilliant—overwritten, flashing rather than lighting. . . . It is a style hospitable to the senses but not especially conducive to thought, to exposition or analysis.” I’ve heard this critique leveled at many young novelists, and it’s often true. But in Cline’s case, it’s not. The way her writing is hospitable to the senses represents the highest form of thinking.
