“Ticknor is going to his friend Prescott’s house for dinner; he is carrying a pie. But his ruminations, his qualms and counter-qualms, expand at an alarming rate. He fails to set out in time. Upon reflection: he has failed to set out in life. .. Ticknor is one of those works—I think of Bernhard’s The Loser or Beckett’s Watt—that shows how an obsessional narrator can evince a strange mix of impotence and power. Ticknor can do nothing, can decide nothing; he is trapped in the infinite regress of his own revulsion, his sense that he has wasted his life. And yet he/Heti narrates his shortcomings and regrets and contradictions with intelligence, pathos, and lyric force.” - Ben Lerner
"A gently compassionate portrait, a dramatic monologue, delivered by a man who considers himself a failure... Heti's account is a historical novel, but it is held together not by its historical accuracy but by its smoothly involving prose and by the melancholy intensity of its narrator. That it is the work of a postmodernist rather than a conventional realist can be felt in its compact and bold autonomy. It creates a single world of prose, a discrete unfurling address..." - James Wood, The New Yorker
Translated into French and Serbian.
Read reviews by Mark Sarvas in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Benjamin Lytal in The New York Sun, Brit Peterson in The San Francisco Chronicle, and Anna Godbersen in Esquire.