 The novel is related by several unreliable narrators and is concerned with questions of identity, racial passing, and the nature of storytelling.Writing in "The New York Times", Dwight Garner criticized its blending of genres as "something close to a disaster," but Viet Thanh Nguyen, in "The New York Times Book Review", called it an "elegantly constructed novel" and cautioned that "Sorrentino's novel might be a little deceptive because it disguises its complexity," while Jim Ruland in the "Los Angeles Times" described "The Fugitives" as "stunning" and "an entirely new kind of novel.