"Respectfully, it's an odd thing to say that Coates's debut is essentially long and shallow, but compare him to some of the most masterful storytellers in the canon."

"I understand it's challenging in this day in age to just say one or the other for fear of being cancelled, but you don't need to bring in Octavia Butler or Toni Morrison in order to do so. None of the sentences highlighted here suggest the tonality of any of the writers you've compared his debut to, either, except for Stephen King — even then, the most comparable thing seems to be pace and plot, not the shape or substance of the novel."

That's the top-rated comment at the NYT review of "The Water Dancer," the first novel by the high-profile nonfiction writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. I can see how the unsung fiction-writers of the world can be very easily irked when somebody who's already successful for some other reason suddenly presents himself as a novelist.

The review is by Dwight Garner — I don't have a problem with the name Garner — and I was looking at the NYT list of his other reviews and I see he reviewed a novel that I happen to have just finished reading: "With ‘Doxology,’ Nell Zink Delivers Her Most Ambitious and Expansive Novel Yet." As in the "Water Dancer" review, Garner names a lot of other writers, and unlike the "Water Dancer" review, this review has some solid quotes from the author to prove the praise is soundly based on artistic merit:

Here’s a sample of this writer’s sociological acumen — her ability, like Tom Wolfe by way of Lorrie Moore, to cram observation into a tight space:

“The ’80s hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the ‘hipster’ in the new century. He wasn’t a ’50s hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture,” she writes. “Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open-wheel motor sports and Jell-O salads from whence he sprang.”

Zink adds, as a flourish: “An ’80s hipster couldn’t gentrify a neighborhood.” She writes: “His presence drove rents down.” Also: “The ’80s hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks.”

If you care about this sort of thing, Zink writes about music as if she were a cluster of the best American rock critics (Ellen Willis, Ann Powers, Jessica Hopper and Amanda Petrusich, let’s say) crushed together under a single byline. This novel is replete with erudite signifiers that drop all over the place, like a toddler eating a pint of blueberries: Robert Christgau jokes, nods to the “Casio-core” sound, paeans to the righteous punk glory of Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi.

One band sounds “like lawn mowers ridden by nymphets playing banjos.” When Pamela plays guitar, “her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens.”

Pamela goes into a funny monologue about the weird confluence between Todd Rundgren (“Todd is God,” she says), John Lennon and Mark David Chapman, Lennon’s assassin. Daniel stares at her and thinks: “It was a kind of knowledge he didn’t expect a woman to have, much less care enough to say something post-sensitive about.”

That's well done and fairly written. I'm not going to take an anti-Garner position. I'll just let that comment about the Ta-Nehisi Coates book stand for what it's worth. If you look at the comment and then back at the review, you can see Garner's disapproval:

“The Water Dancer” is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of [some famous writers].... The ride is bracing, even if one sometimes misses the grainy and intense intellection of his nonfiction writing. In his earlier [nonfiction] books each paragraph felt like a bouillon cube that could be used to brew six other essays. Here the effect is more diffuse, and something intangible goes missing....

Coates’s novel sometimes feels as if it were written quickly, and it has the virtues and defects of that apparent spontaneity. Where his nonfiction runs narrow and quite deep, “The Water Dancer” mostly runs wide and fairly shallow. It’s more interested in movement than in the intensities of sustained perception.