early Italo Calvino collection

review of Calvino's Last Comes the Raven.

This passage is irksome. 

Since then, he has acquired the veneer of cultish allure that I associate with authors—David Foster Wallace, John Kennedy Toole, J. D. Salinger—who are frequently name-checked on Reddit. He is clever and protean, and his metafiction has a galaxy-brain swagger.

There seems something off about shoehorning a European writer in conversation with a wealth of world literature into American disaffected white young males.  

The reviewer gives the game away when referencing Elena Ferrante. That's the other Italian writer she truly knows & obviously prefers. No need to waste that precious Yale degree on reading Buzzati, Levi, or de Maria. 

Great job, New Yorker.