It's not surprising tha Jeannette Winterson likes this (NYT book review). It has short sections, many just one sentence long, which are often bursts of emotion or violently condensed images. Like Winterson, Gander is content to compromise narrative drive in order to insert poetic images. "As a Friend" is, in effect, a novella interlarded with fragments of late twentieth-century American poetry. It's mainly very effective. I had two reservations:

1. The book is divided into four narratives. Their affective power increases from the first to the third, which is a lyric about despair, and the heart of the book to that point. The narrator of the fourth section ruined the lives of the narrators of the second and third sections. But in the fourth section, where the character responsible for the others' despair is finally given a voice, it becomes difficult to pay attention. The excerpts of that character's thoughts can only serve as condemnations of pretense and artifice -- but readers who have responded appropriately to the second and third sections don't need to be persuaded of such things. It would be devastating if the person who wrecked the lives of the other characters turned out to be genuinely inspired or otherwise profound, but no matter how much he talks about himself, art, love, and friendship -- even if that fourth section had been hundreds of pages long -- it isn't persuasive, shocking, or even interesting.

2. Many of Gander's images are typical North American lyric moments: large cricket-like creatures swarm from a cave; a dead shrew wriggles from the activity of the beetles burrowing in its body; a moth is cut in half by a machete. The squashed bugs, moments of sudden disgust, piles of shit or vomit (at least six in the book), are supposed to function as compressed, partly unreadable epiphanies: but they are a such a common device that they read more like placeholders for more appropriate metaphors -- images that might resonate with the surrounding narrative. ( )