“Every aspect of this agile, intoxicating, hilarious, and poignant novel is compelling, but what elevates it is the exuberant language. Hill writes with velocity, rhythm, and wit, conveying a world of subtle emotions and social nuance in brilliantly syncopated inner monologues and staccato dialogue, creating a bravura and resounding performance.”
– Donna Seaman, Booklist
“With evocative, freewheeling prose (‘the run-on sentences that were her married life’), Hill … nimbly salvages one family’s striving from an era of grasping and consumerism.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Truly the most enjoyable, evocative prose I’ve come across in new fiction in quite a while.”
– City Pages
“When All Is Said and Done is a fresh, high-velocity cry from the heart, showing that love is the rose and the thorn at once, and that Mr. Robert Hill has taken a running start into what they used to call the literary scene.”
– Ron Carlson, author of A Kind of Flying
“This is a witty, generous, heartbreaking book which seeks … ‘the common green in our beings’––and finds it.”
– Barbara McMichael, The Olympian
“In flitting seamlessly from the mundane details of daily life to broader questions of love, family, priorities, and death, the author has created a startlingly realistic depiction of the way the mind functions.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“Hill’s novel is strong for all that it does say, and all that it leaves to the reader’s imagination. There’s something poetic in the best of ways about the way that the lines and language unfold. This book reminds me of Cheever and Yates and a young Rick Moody.”
– A.M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven
“Lively and quirky and effervescent with beautiful, unpredictable language and fresh details. A novel of an incredible vitality, original and vibrating, of a superb unforeseeable and detailed writing to the extreme.”
– Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story
“Not many writers will risk burying a gem like ‘memory is such a sloppy librarian’ in the middle of a paragraph. Not so Robert Hill. In his lovely first book … there’s hardly a neutral sentence in sight.”
– Nell Beram, Harvard Review
“From the first glorious sentence to the last astounding word, Robert Hill’s When All Is Said and Done is a treasure. The sophisticated wit and luxurious language of this brilliant novel weave a story of one family’s complex heart and history and their journey through 1950s/60s suburban Connecticut and all its prejudices. Read this American saga and weep.”
– Tom Spanbauer, author of I Loved You More
“Out of nowhere comes Robert Hill’s When All Is Said and Done, a swift, moving novel of the 1950s from a man who has been writing advertising copy in Portland, Oregon, for twenty years. Its form resembles the alternate first-person accounts of a troubled relationship in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over; in its historical shimmer, it recalls Richard Yates’s increasingly beloved Revolutionary Road. … Reading Mr. Hill’s debut novel reminds us how usual most novels are; his is unusual, but not unsettling or obviously weird. Perhaps it is simply the work of an individual who has been minding his own business in Portland.”
– Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun
“His is the sort of book which you find yourself wanting to write down passages of particular grace––only to realize that alone, they appear unremarkable. It’s in context of this affecting book that each scene is so striking. … Above all, it’s a love story, one complicated with careers and children and growth and stagnancy: completely mundane and completely extraordinary.”
– Molly Templeton, Eugene Weekly
“A snappy, palatable iteration of modernism, too earnest and heartfelt to be called postanything.”
– Patrick Somerville, Bookshop Bibliosurf
“Exuberant as a rhythmic song, the first novel by Robert Hill is not only smart, it is brilliant, stylish, and offers not a novel but a dramatic existential novel.”
– Jean Soublin, Le Monde
“Simultaneously prosaic and breathtaking, All’s Well That Ends (French translation) is the first novel of a great writer in the tradition of Raymond Carver.”
– Payot & Rivages