The New York Times
This is a generous, affirming novel. By its end, the self-obsessed novelist comes to embrace life, its hardships as well as its possibilities. We don't believe he'll live happily ever after, but we do believe that for all its troubles it will be a life worth living. This is equally true of Chick's life, despite its containing hardships of a magnitude most Westerners are unlikely to encounter. — Geoff Nicholson
The New Yorker
Raban’s second novel, which takes place amid Seattle’s dot-com boom, satirizes the formerly sleepy city, its provincialism veneered by new wealth. Tom Janeway is an introverted British novelist and writing professor, whose wife, enriched by her job at a Web site, has left him. With his aged house rotting around him, Tom hires Chick, a recent illegal immigrant from China, to do repair work. Chick inveigles his way into Tom’s household, enabling Raban to show the parallel struggles of two hapless outsiders adjusting to their adopted country. The novel succeeds in skewering a city so eager to amplify its own celebrity that even riots and terrorist plots become matters of pride. But while Raban writes with energy and incisiveness, his characters are thinly drawn, and his well-phrased sallies seem wasted on such familiar marks as the follies of the technology bubble and academic snobbery.
The Washington Post
Waxwings...is both a comedy of manners and a superbly funny social satire...Raban returns to fiction after almost 20 years. He has spent the intervening time writing chiefly of his travels, and his eye for the telling, resonant detail is abundantly evident here. In its comedy and melancholy appreciation of the human predicament in the new millennium, this novel goes a long way toward making it bearable.—Katherine Powers
Publishers Weekly
A Hungarian-born British expatriate settled in dot-com-frenzied Seattle is the bemused protagonist of this inspired jumble of a novel, travel writer Raban's first since 1985's Foreign Land. Tom Janeway is a professor of writing, a novelist and a public radio commentator; his wife, Beth, works for GetaShack.com, a startup providing virtual neighborhood tours for prospective house buyers. They have a four-year-old son named Finn, and they appear content. Behind the happy facade, though, Beth has grown deeply unhappy with her self-absorbed husband, his immersion in books and his pretentious radio voice ("his fucking rolled r's")-she hankers after expensive cars, a bright new condo and honest attention. Unfolding in counterpoint to Raban's chronicle of the rather civilized collapse of their marriage is the story of a shady Chinese immigrant called Chick; he survives a horrific journey to America and becomes an off-the-books contractor who bullies Tom into employing him to renovate their gloomy old house after Beth moves out. Beneath the surface, larger currents are swirling, and Tom is suddenly swept up in them when he goes for a walk on a local nature trail and is misidentified as a suspect in a series of child murders. Chick's unpredictable antics sharpen the sense of menace, while a subplot about an egotistical British novelist who is considering a residency at Tom's college provides effective comic relief. Raban's caustic, affectionate commentary on the manic gyrations of millennial America unites these disparate plot lines, making his novel a wry paean to the cluttered, freewheeling lives led by the motley residents of an immigrant nation. (Sept. 30) Forecast: Raban, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996 for Bad Land, is a Brit expatriate and Seattle resident himself. Waxwings was just shortlisted for the Booker, and should attract considerable attention as the author's first novel in nearly 20 years. Eight-city author tour. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
From Bad Land to Passage to Juneau, Raban's perennial theme is the immigrant experience. This work, set in Seattle in the late 1990s, intertwines the lives of two immigrants at opposite ends of the social scale. The perfect life of British expatriate Tom Janeway starts to unravel when his wife takes a lucrative job with an Internet start-up. She buys a new car and a new condo and then files for divorce. In short order, Tom loses his teaching position at the university and his job as an NPR commentator. Chick, Tom's Chinese counterpart, is smuggled into the United States in a shipping container crowded with illegals. Within a few months, he is supervising his own crew of undocumented workers, repairing roofs in Tom's upscale neighborhood. Waxwings succeeds as a sharply observed satire of the Internet boom and as a bittersweet meditation on the American dream but is somewhat less successful as a Dickensian portrait of Seattle. Recommended for larger fiction collections and for libraries with a strong interest in the Pacific Northwest. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/03.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
British-born Raban (Passage to Juneau, 1999, etc.) sends a poison-pen letter to his adopted homeland in this witty account of America at the turn of the millennium. The tale is set in Seattle, where expatriate English novelist Tom Janeway pontificates on NPR's All Things Considered and teaches writing at the University of Washington while his hotshot wife Beth counts returns on the IPO of her Internet realty business, GetaShack.com. The riots that recently marred the 1999 WTO conference have led the mayor to cancel all New Year's Eve celebrations, but for the most part (Y2K fears notwithstanding) everyone is looking forward to the new century with very little dread. Even Chick Lee, an illegal immigrant from China who nearly died as a stowaway on a container ship, has been able to evade the INS and make a decent living for himself as a day laborer in the boom economy. But there are intimations that the party may be winding down-not least being the arrest of an al-Quaeda terrorist caught trying to cross the border in a car full of explosives. And Tom's private life becomes a tangle of complications in short order. First, Beth (stung by some flippant remarks Tom made about the dot.com economy on one of his radio spots) leaves him, taking their four-year-old son Finn with her. Then Tom is identified as a suspect in a string of missing-persons' cases because he happened to be hiking in the woods where one of the missing was last seen. Meanwhile, Chick sets himself up as a contractor and brings a gang of Mexican illegals over to fix Tom's roof-just as the police investigation is heating up. Is the bubble about to burst? Or is Tom just going through a rough patch? We know, of course, but Tomdoesn't. Sharper (and a lot faster) than The Bonfire of the Vanities, may well be one of the best accounts ever written of an American era. Author tour
