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Outstanding
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Booklist Joanne Wilkinson
Like novelist Richard Russo, Prose uses humor to light up key social issues, to skewer smugness, and to create characters whose flaws only add to their depth and richness. [1 Dec 2004, p.619]
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Mameve Medwed
Wonderful, dark, and hilarious.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Her lively skewering of a whole cross-section of society ensures that this tale hits comic high notes even as it probes serious issues. [20 Dec 2004, p.34]
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Outstanding
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Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Francine Prose operates with such tact and verve in her astute new novel, A Changed Man, that the sacred cows she targets walk away stunned but healthier for having been so expertly needled.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
An edgy, riveting tale, one of Prose's most interesting. [1 Jan 2005, p.17]
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Aritha Van Herk
Compelling and suspenseful, funny and yet awkwardly tender. [26 Mar 2005, p.D5]
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Liesl Schillinger
Powerful, funny and exquisitely nuanced.
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Outstanding
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Salon Andrew O'Hehir
If "A Changed Man" is satire, then so are lots of other things, including "Anna Karenina," "Middlemarch" and "Our Mutual Friend." I'm not suggesting that this novel is playing quite in that league, but I am suggesting that Prose is striving for the same kind of large-scale social portraiture, and that her desire to capture contemporary Americans, with all their internal contradictions, solipsism and general screwed-upness, is guided more by the spirit of compassion than by that of mockery.
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Favorable
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USA Today Carol Memmott
As a novel of ideas, it is refreshing. We are allowed to enter the moral dilemmas of fascinating characters whose emotional lives are strung out by the same human frailties, secrets and insecurities we all share.
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Favorable
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Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
Prose combines a bracing energy with a deft touch in the details.... But the last act falters, just a little.
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Favorable
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New York Observer Daniel Asa Rose
If in A Changed Man you occasionally find yourself hungering for less -- less discourse, less internal monologuing, fewer stretches where the actors get mired down by conscience the way a video figure periodically slogs through muddy patches -- console yourself with the thought that this is kind of a Jewish book, after all, not kind of a Nazi book: more talk than action. [14 Mar 2005]
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Robert Birnbaum
There is a temptation to view Prose's novel as a novel of transformation and America's self-congratulatory attitudes on self-invention and reinvention.... But the novel does not need such added weight to recommend it. "A Changed Man" has a comprehensible scope, with attractive characters well wrought in precise prose, and it carries that weight well.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
Not a lot actually happens in "A Changed Man." Its main events are social gatherings, perceptively sliced and diced in ways that bring Tom Wolfe to mind.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Allison Lynn
But as Prose's characters ask these questions, they also obsess over every little detail around them and, as a result, the narrative nearly derails.... In another writer's hands, these problems might be debilitating. In A Changed Man, they're simply stumbling blocks, overcome by Prose's steamrolling sense of humor and her shamelessness in holding a mirror up to all of our own worst impulses.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Julia Livshin
Has the unmistakable feel of an exercise--an accomplished, expertly plotted exercise, but an exercise nonetheless.
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Favorable
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PopMatters Anne K. Yoder
Line by line, her crisp writing, her broad imagination, and her nuanced observations keep the ideas rolling and the characters real, even when the storyline lags.
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Favorable
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The Independent Marianne Brace
Though overlong, A Changed Man is wickedly entertaining, and Prose's ironic gaze consistently laser-sharp.
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Favorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Prose turns what sounds like a heartwarming concept into a... sharp assessment of political correctness.
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Mixed
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Stanley Trachtenberg
Limited in their awareness, static in development, these characters emerge as stereotypes whose thoughts are often hard to distinguish from one another. Without such individuality, the plot dissolves into occasions for the expression of attitudes, the death of comedy but a staple of burlesque.
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Mixed
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Houston Chronicle Richard H. Costa
[An] overlong, over-managed political novel.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Blake Eskin
While these brisk and sometimes amusing soliloquies of self-doubt make A Changed Man a readable entertainment, they often telegraph what's to come and, what's worse, conspire to put the entire plot in the inconsequential realm of middle-class neurosis.
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Mixed
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The New Yorker
As a sendup, the book is quite fun, but too often Prose’s writing falls victim to the very earnestness that she satirizes.
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Mixed
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PopMatters Patricia Storms
It's an interesting story, and that's about it.
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Mixed
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LA Weekly Ben Cosgrove
Unfortunately, as the novel progresses, one can’t help feeling that the ride would have been twice as enjoyable, and infinitely more bracing, if it had been half as long.
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Unfavorable
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Library Journal Jim Coan
Though any new work by the award-winning Prose will attract readers, this one is frankly not all that interesting. [1 Jan 2005, p.100]
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Unfavorable
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The Guardian Lucy Ellmann
Her faith in America and the essential innocence of its inhabitants turns what could have been a challenging read into a witless fable for our times.
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