My introduction to the fiction of Mattias Edvardsson is A Nearly Normal Family. Published in 2019, translated to English by Rachel Willson-Broyles, thMy introduction to the fiction of Mattias Edvardsson is A Nearly Normal Family. Published in 2019, translated to English by Rachel Willson-Broyles, this is a crime thriller about a couple in Sweden whose 18-year-old daughter is accused of murdering the 32-year-old son of a law professor. Did she do it? What lengths will her parents go to protect their child?
I abandoned this on page 49/389.
The author generates some nice, not riveting, suspense in the very early go, teasing the appearance of a father at the trial of his daughter. Then we move back in time. What is she accused of? Who did she supposedly do it to? Those questions are wrapped up within the first 40 pages and I started to lose interest.
The English translation isn't bad, just tinny more than enough times to make it evident I was reading a translation. Minor things stuck out. A handball--I didn't even know this was a sport--coach asks a parent to be his colleague. Like, assistant? Minor stuff, nothing to make me stop reading.
The narrator is a pastor. I know readers who are turned off by discussions of God in their fiction and I wouldn't recommend this novel to anyone with those preferences. I didn't have a problem with the narrator's job. I just wish his job was dramatized instead of being summarized.
Summarization vs. dramatization. The reader is told about the family's weekend schedule. We're told about episodes from the daughter's childhood that suggest a sociopath in training, meaning she could either be a murderer or a CEO, either/or. We're told how the father feels about his daughter. So much telling made it easier for me to ignore the story than I would have if I was being shown character through dramatization.
The daughter, Stella, is completely objectified early on by the narrator as a precious little dove who is innocent. The fact that there is a lifetime of antisocial behavior, a tenuous relationship with the father, and very suspicious comings and goings on the night of the crime are overlooked. Stupid characters make it difficult for me to continue reading.
Nearly every chapter includes or ends with foreshadowing of the "... little did we know our lives would soon change" variety that struck me as very amateurish. These could all have been deleted without the novel missing them.
A debut novel, so no rating from me. The book appealed to readers with a sweet tooth for domestic suspense and unraveling crime, serving as source material for a six-episode mini-series on Netflix, shot in Swedish and dubbed to English, which Edvardsson did not adapt....more
My introduction to the fiction of Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen is An Anonymous Girl. Published in 2018, this is the best of the recently publishedMy introduction to the fiction of Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen is An Anonymous Girl. Published in 2018, this is the best of the recently published thrillers I've quit, its authors taking me to page 190/371 before I abandoned it. They equip their heroine with a fascinating job and intriguing backstory, then isolate her financially and emotionally in New York, where a clinical psychological study places her in a series of increasingly odd and perhaps dangerous social situations.
The authors do a good job establishing a compelling noir character in Jessica Farris, a makeup artist whose love of theater drew her to Manhattan, where she now makes ends meet going on house calls to give a series of poorly tipping clients makeovers. Jeopardy is introduced with her family in Pennsylvania facing financial collapse. Jess has a dark secret, too. The writing is concise, parsing out information slowly, and short chapters keep the story moving.
An Anonymous Girl alternates between the perspective of Jessica, and the point of view of Dr. Shields, director of a university study Jess gets word of while on a call and crashes for a chance at some quick cash. Her answers to a series of questions gauging her morality soon make her the focus of the increasingly unprofessional study. I tend to dislike novels that bounce between narrators and this was no exception. I didn't want to be told Dr. Shields's thoughts about Jess. I wanted to see what sort of mess Jess has to get herself out of.
Jessica isn't placed in sufficiently dangerous situations through 50%, giving the novel the feeling of low stakes. When I noticed I wasn't updating my status with writing I found special, that was a red flag. The novel felt like a short story padded to novel length, with too much intrigue piled on top of intrigue. There's good character building, strong sense of place, concise writing ... and a story that I didn't care about. I co-sign anyone who calls this a page-turner, but the stark lack of anything more than ethically questionable behavior is exhibited from the villain through 50%, prompting me to stop turning the pages.
Not a debut novel, so I have to give it the rating I do for all books I abandon....more
Market research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know.
Published inMarket research read. If anyone knows any novels published 2019 forward about women plotting to commit or caught up in crime, let me know.
Published in 2019, The Night Before by Wendy Walker is a commercial thriller in which the life of a young mom with the perfect child and perfect husband is upended when her sister disappears on an Internet date. I quit the book on page 34/310 due to telling versus showing.
Telling is summarization. Showing is dramatization. All novels have some telling in them, or they'd be 1,000 pages long. Bad novels are strictly telling. "Reggie stopped by the mini-mart for little chocolate donuts. This was his custom after a shift at the toy factory and had been for years ..." versus an author describing Reggie entering the mini-mart and grabbing his items. If his job at the toy factory or his purchases have significance, Reggie can reveal that in dialogue with the clerk. That's also showing.
An author telling me is telling. In plot-driven novels, particularly thrillers, the author can too often get in the way of what's more important: the story.
Walker's writing is very rudimentary. She clutches at her pearls over the topic of Internet dating, which is surprising considering the year this was published, but according to some people, Internet dating is still a surefire way to get yourself murdered (warn your nieces). Trivial information is imparted while vital information withheld. The characters were flat. At best, if I read another 200 pages, they'd get into thrilling situations, maybe. But the author's unwillingness to show me anything in favor of telling is so counterintuitive to good storytelling that I didn't have the patience to continue.
No rating because I picked the novel up and put it right down.
Also, I see "psychological thriller" used to describe novels like this, but other than beginning in a psychiatrist's office, I couldn't discern anything psychological about it. A woman's sister disappears. She's not imagining that. She doesn't need to see a doctor. Her sister is gone. There's nothing psychologically curious about it, like Rosemary's Baby. I'd classify these books as domestic thrillers or mystery/ suspense but then again, no one is asking me to come reorganize their bookstore....more
My introduction to the fiction of Kirsten Chen is Counterfeit. Published in 2022, this novel was mentioned by a literary agent--not Chen's--I'm submitMy introduction to the fiction of Kirsten Chen is Counterfeit. Published in 2022, this novel was mentioned by a literary agent--not Chen's--I'm submitting my work to as being an example of the type of "secrets and lies" suspense novel she loves, so I wanted to read it. Upmarket fiction, complicated women, suspense where you get to know the characters, all of these boxes check what I plan to submit.
I abandoned this one on page 50/274.
Summarization vs. dramatization. The author tells the reader everything. We're told about a law school grad living in San Francisco who's given up her career to raise her tyrannical two-year-old with her nanny while growing distant from her surgeon husband. We're told about the reunion with a mysterious college roommate who invites her to join her operation in trafficking counterfeit luxury goods. We're not shown anything. The telling is so overwhelming that Chen doesn't even use quotation marks for dialogue. The novel is just a run-on recap of action or dialogue.
Several days after the Neiman's fiasco, Winnie called me to apologize. She said she hadn't been thinking straight. Dealing with Guangzhou remotely was such a colossal headache that the stress had gotten to her. She was about to pay top dollar for a shipment practically sight unseen--she cut herself off then. You've made your views clear, she said, so that's the last thing I'll say about your work. But, Ava, I want you to know that I've loved spending time with you and Henri. I hope we can remain friends.
I don't want to read Cliff Notes, I want to read the original version.
Foreshadowing indicates the main character is being questioned by police, but is glib beyond the point anyone being questioned by a detective would be, especially if she'd committed a crime. I generally dislike foreshadowing due to how amateurish it often feels, and unnecessary.
70% of the first fifty pages involves the tantrums the main character's infant is throwing. No judgment here, but I lost interest in the main character due to how incompetent she appears to be in parenting, requiring a full-time Mexican nanny to help her not quell her son's outbursts.
First World problems: Main character unfulfilled giving up a legal career to be a mother and wife, as well as grow distant from her surgeon husband, who's working surgeon hours to give them the lifestyle she covets. Can authors either pretend not everyone graduates from Stanford, marries a doctor, and hires a nanny to help them manage the household, or, make me care?
Through fifty pages, Counterfeit isn't suspenseful, so to call it a thriller would be a stretch. It doesn't present a crime or a puzzle to be solved, precluding it from mystery. It isn't funny, so it's not comic. There aren't any aliens, robots, or time travelers, so it's definitely not science fiction. What is this? Boring.
This is not a debut, it just reads like one, so I'll have to give it my usual rating when I abandon a book. This is an unpopular opinion. Chen has drawn admiration from a top literary agent who probably wishes she represented her, as well as selection for Reese's Book Club, so, more power to her....more
My introduction to the fiction of Grace D. Li is Portrait of a Thief. Published in 2022, this debut thriller follows five Chinese Americans who with sMy introduction to the fiction of Grace D. Li is Portrait of a Thief. Published in 2022, this debut thriller follows five Chinese Americans who with support from a mysterious benefactor in Beijing conspire to steal back five Chinese sculptures looted from the city centuries ago. The ringleader, Will Chen, is a Harvard senior majoring in art history. His sister Irene is a public policy expert at Duke who can talk anyone into anything. Daniel Liang is a premed student who can pick locks. Lily Wu is an engineering major who races cars for cash and acts as getaway driver. Alex Hiang is an MIT dropout and a computer hacker.
I abandoned this on page 57/369. At 15%, the conceit is stretched to the point it snaps. Five college students with financially rewarding if unfulfilling futures decide to risk their freedom and perhaps their lives because art needs to be returned to Beijing. Okay. But they assemble with a deafening level of disconnect. Their conversations with each other are low energy and their thoughts--chapters alternate between Will, Irene, Daniel, Lily and Alex in a way that hurts the pacing--are mundane. It's as if the novel were about a trip to the Apple Bar and the characters were struggling with where to eat lunch.
Li summarizes an awful lot, falling into the trap of telling instead of showing. Even a heist that Will witnesses and is subsequently questioned about by police ... just happens. Stakes feel low. Spreading the point of view between five characters hinders rather than helps the story, which would've benefited by just being about Will as he goes down the ring of fire. For Li's next novel, I'm hoping for characters who have the best possible thing happen to them or the worst possible thing, preferably both. Her debut shoots right down the middle of the road into the lukewarm. No rating because this is a debut novel....more
My introduction to the fiction of Gina Wohlsdorf is her debut novel Security. Published in 2016, this was hyped by CrimeReads, whose standards, I'm leMy introduction to the fiction of Gina Wohlsdorf is her debut novel Security. Published in 2016, this was hyped by CrimeReads, whose standards, I'm learning, for a good thriller seem to be that it's not a telephone or a cow but a book. Recommended three times ("9 Crime Novels You Should Read In August," "Six Great Novels with Mysterious Protagonists," "Six Thrillers That Use Unusual Structures To Build Suspense"), the story seems to involve a luxury hotel in Santa Barbara which on the eve of its grand opening is plagued by a killer on the loose.
What's going on or what the nature of reality is seem to be at play, but I abandoned this on page 36/229 due to its perplexing points of view, unconventional formatting, bewildering action and superficial characters. The author tips her hat to Daphne du Maurier and Rebecca, but that was a novel with concise and powerful prose, excellent dialogue and vivid characters. We wanted to figure out what type of novel it was exactly--gothic romance, murder mystery, ghost story--because the scenario was so intoxicating. Reading Security is like being hung over.
Wohlsdorf introduces a hotel manager named Tessa who seems to be the protagonist. A daredevil who may be either a foster brother or ex-boyfriend shows up to follow her on her rounds. The hotel's owner has personally berated every employee before leaving for the day, you know, like wealthy men do. A killer (referred to as The Killer) wearing a Michael Myers mask speaks in first person. A chef darts out of a door and slices Tessa's hand with a knife accidentally then farts while she continues on her rounds with the daredevil following her around for God knows why.
At the 15% mark, I had no idea if this was a slasher movie script in book form, a video game simulation, or a dream. I am not at all the reader for these postmodern slasher novels like The Last Final Girl that attempt to reimagine what a novel is, not because I dislike '70s or '80s slasher movies, but because I hate writing that calls attention to itself. I don't want to read a construct, I want to read something real. This book seems to have designs to be a puzzle for reader. That's easy: puzzle me whether the author has ever read a book. I see no evidence Wohlsdorf has....more
My introduction to the fiction of Elizabeth Little is Dear Daughter. Published in 2014, this debut novel is the first-person account of Jane Jenkins, My introduction to the fiction of Elizabeth Little is Dear Daughter. Published in 2014, this debut novel is the first-person account of Jane Jenkins, an infamous society girl who spent ten years in prison for the murder of her wealthy mother. Exonerated due to mismanaged evidence and released, Jane sets out to find her mother's real killer, if there is one, Jane's memory a fog of drugs, alcohol and repressed memory. Web sleuths and the paparazzi are hot on her trail. This rollicking mystery was not a good match for me and I abandoned it on page 88/358.
- Pop-culture addled narrator. If you love movie, TV, music and cultural references, you'd better love them on every page with this book. I'll give Little credit, she throws in a Beethoven reference and a Brown vs. Board of Education reference. I've never seen anyone whose liberal arts education paid such dividends as it does here. Problem 1: I didn't feel this was appropriate for a narrator who's been in prison for a decade and by her own admission, cut off from society. That's the author dropping these bon mots, not her narrator. Problem 2: It's goddamn annoying.
Fortunately, I had some experience with this particular species. For the first fifteen years of my life I had been shuffled from tutor to tutor, learning all the things my mother thought ladies (or bastard children of petty nobility) should know--which as far as I can tell were gleamed directly from an Edith Wharton novel. I studied etiquette, music, antique furniture, napkin folding. I can spot a fake Picasso at a thousand paces; I dance the gavotte; I'm adept with a lemon fork, a butter pick, and a piccalilli spoon. My education was then rounded out with perfunctory attention to the more usual subjects, which were taught largely by mediocre or disgraced academics who were unwilling to cry uncle and find another field.
I'm in awe of the cultural salad that is this paragraph. It's not that the writing is bad or I didn't find some of it funny. One of the frequent news updates or social media feeds that Little inserts between chapters made me laugh out loud. But all I needed was one quip or one reference to get the point here. Reminding me that the narrator was a culture junkie on every page was repetitive.
- Narrator jumping back-and-forth (within the same chapter even) between the present and her past made an unsteady narration flying all over the place even more annoying to follow.
- Narrator vastly overstating her celebrity or newsworthiness. Within a week of being released from prison, if that, the public would've forgotten about Jane and exhibited zero interest in her whereabouts. But Little has Jane running around like Dr. Richard Kimble, a fugitive from a chain gang, her face on every screen. She could've hunkered down in a hotel for a week and reemerged with zero attention.
- Media overload. I've yet to read a novel deeply immersed in podcasting or cable news or reality TV or social media that I've enjoyed. One of the reasons I read is to get away from that noise. My phone is always within reach if I need breaking news, and I dislike novels that overdose on media.
There was a more compelling story here that Little missed. Instead of a woman being exonerated for a capital crime and going in search of the killer, what if a woman was exonerated for a capital crime and with no prospects (Jane had no job before she was sent to the hoosegow) she's drawn into committing a crime? ("On the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook" -- Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption.) The more interesting question is staring right at us: Even if Jane finds the killer, then what? What's she do with her life?
Here's a dissenting, four-star review from a hugely popular reviewer on Goodreads! Why not a five-star review? The most popular five-star review for this book only has 24 likes. Objection withdrawn ...
My introduction to the fiction of Sarah Gailey is The Echo Wife. Published in 2021, this came highly recommended by the folks at CrimeReads, who notchMy introduction to the fiction of Sarah Gailey is The Echo Wife. Published in 2021, this came highly recommended by the folks at CrimeReads, who notched it as one of the top speculative thrillers or mysteries of the year. The title and the concept grabbed me--a scientist's clone murders her ex-husband. This is what I hoped The Stepford Wives could've been, perhaps written for today's world. I abandoned it on page 58/254. This is my tenth year reviewing on Goodreads. I've reviewed 475 books. The Echo Wife might be the 474th best book I've read in that span.
This novel quacks like Young Adult fiction. Readers should beware that whatever you anticipate here in a science fiction thriller or domestic thriller is put in a pair of YA floaties and dropped in the baby pool. The narrative is a first person point of view and sounds like a thirteen-year-old speaking aloud. Evelyn expresses anxiety over her appearance at a work function, from the gown she’s wearing to answering questions about her ex-husband to whether people think she is a bitch.
The story develops with the clarity of a Mad Libs. I have no idea what the narrator, “Evelyn Caldwell,” does for a living other than she is a “Scientist” doing important research on “Cloning.” Her “Terrible Ex-Husband” is mentioned incessantly, like a teen who isn’t over her breakup. It's revealed his new wife is a “Witch” (just kidding, she’s a “Clone.”) The cloning technology is widely known in this world but with no legal rights, it’s vague how the clone, Martine, has come to be married and pregnant. Because the Terrible Ex-Husband?
I love novels about women or in women's voices where the needs or opinions of a man are not being weighed constantly. A novel about a scientist whose research she hopes will change the world would seem like a good opportunity to tell a story about a woman with her own agency. That doesn't happen here. As for the story, Michael Crichton is rolling over in his grave. The writing is like an experiment in how to write a bad novel without the assistance of ChatGPT.
I looked down at him, and at the blood, and I waited for the grief to strike me down. I was sure that it would hit me at some point. For all that I was furious at him--for all that I hated what he'd done and who he'd become--he was still my husband. I had stood across from him on a Saturday afternoon, in front of all of our friends and all of his family, wearing a dress and the jewelry that he'd given me. I had tied my life to his. I could smell my own grief, distant, like the first hint of smoke on the wind.
I've read one novel worse than The Echo Wife in the last ten years; that one involved werewolves trying to take over the world. Due to me not finishing it, I don't know if there's a compelling mystery here involving the Clone and the Terrible Ex-Husband. He’s sketched so dastardly that if Gailey is divorced, she never has to apologize for her ex-spouse. Novelists need to stay in the Young Adult lane if they want to write Young Adult fiction. The pitch, the content, the cover art and the marketing should all be geared toward the reader they're trying to reach. This book is a bait-and-switch that I'm cutting bait on....more
My introduction to the fiction of Amina Akhtar is Kismet. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir My introduction to the fiction of Amina Akhtar is Kismet. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir fiction of the year. I finished the prologue and one chapter in roughly 20 minutes before abandoning it. I don't read books to hate them and wanted to love this one as I start my jag into recently published crime fiction. But this is the fourth skunk in a row recommended by CrimeReads. Actually, skunks are cute. They defend themselves like any other creature but in a particularly malodorous way. Skunks are misunderstood.
Kismet concerns Ronnie Khan, a young woman who relocates from New York to Sedona, Arizona with a co-worker named Marley Dewhurst, and gets indoctrinated into the healthy living lifestyle and larger wellness community of the region. Some ravens visiting Ronnie in her dreams lead her to bury a body she's made dead in the prologue, but really, if you lived in the version of Sedona characterized in this novel, you wouldn't need dreams, birds or dreams of birds to drive you to murder.
Nothing in the first chapter of this novel adheres to any organizational intelligence. Ronnie has agreed to not only move in with a blow-up doll she vaguely knows from work (that would be Marley, in case the name didn't give it away) but move cross country with her to a region she's never been. Was Ronnie offered a better paying job? Is she getting over a trauma? Is she impulsive? No, she just moves to Sedona, because that's funny, right?
While suffering on a hike with Marley (apparently, no one in New York is accustomed to walking), Ronnie discovers a dismembered corpse. Right there on the trail, a man's head on an agave plant. Marley tells Ronnie to drink more water. Because the more Marley repeats healthy living mantras, the funnier the book will be, right? Why Ronnie would leave New York with a nitwit she doesn't even like is more mysterious than how the head got there.
The writing is bad bad bad bad bad, telling telling exaggerated points telling.
Meditation time was over. "Let's get lunch!" Marley chiriped. She was completely unfazed by the human body parts they'd seen just that morning. Ronnie tried to shake it off too. But she couldn't help it. She felt sad for the person and terrified that things like that happened in this cheerful tourist town.
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I guess I don't cotton to comic or "darkly comic" novels written as if everything is a joke. Whatever the humor, that really needs to originate from the character and resemble what someone would do or say if they encountered a ridiculous situation. Things can't just pile on because they seem funny without laying a foundation in truth first. That's my comedy opinion, anyway. Caroline Kepnes and Alex Segura are among the crime writers who provided blurbs. Every bad novel ever published traditionally has one or more blurbs from other published authors lauding it, though.
The bright spot here is the cover design by Shasti O'Leary Soudant. Red bluffs, a bloody swimming pool, a raven and ominous storm clouds. I should've taken that as a warning.
My introduction to the fiction of Chris Offutt is Shifty's Boys. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the besMy introduction to the fiction of Chris Offutt is Shifty's Boys. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir fiction of the year. This is the third swing and a miss from the book nuts at CrimeReads. I skimmed Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski and abandoned Don't Know Tough by Eli Cranor. With Shifty's Boys I gave up halfway through, but darn gorn liked enough of it to add an extra star. These are books, do involve crime and are professionally edited. I didn't notice any spelling errors. Beyond that, these authors haven't given me much of a reason to keep turning pages of their books.
The story involves an army CID officer named Mick Hardin who's been wounded by an IED in Afghanistan. Reaching the last leg of his rehab, Mick has claimed his wife in Rocksalt, Kentucky can take care of him and receives permission to return home. In fact, Mick's wife has left him. He moves in with his sister Linda Hardin, newly elected town sheriff, who prefers living alone and wishes her brother would go back to the army. Mick is summoned by Shifty, the matriarch of a backwoods heroin peddling family to look into the murder of her boy Fuckin' Barney, who was found shot dead in town. That's his name: Fuckin' Barney.
Shifty's Boys isn't a cozy mystery but it is very easy going. It makes some of Elmore Leonard's novels feel meticulous. Like Leonard, Offutt surfs the rhythms of day-to-day living pretty honestly. His characters are eccentrics. There's a deputy sheriff with an inordinate interest in Kentucky trivia. There's a cab driver who dreams of being a race car driver. There's the inventor who's working on the town's solar energy problem (the hills don't allow sufficient sunlight in to power solar panels). The chief reason to read or finish reading books like this is to simply hang out with the characters. Nothing of import happens, kind of like real life.
I'd literally be more interested in a novel about a dog stuck in a tree (one of Offutt's small town developments) than follow an amateur detective who for lack of anything on TV looks into the death of a hillbilly heroin dealer. It feels credibly "small town" (I like how "ought" is spelled "ort" in one passage of dialogue) and the author's procedural detail is on point, but there are zero stakes. Mick Hardin pokes around and asks questions without any threat to his physical or existential well-being because this allows Offutt to introduce more characters. While cute, I didn't adore these characters nearly as much as the author seems to.
There's nothing remarkable here about the story or characters. Army veteran who's real observant with crime scenes. A female sheriff. Dueling hillbilly drug families. This seems like Rural Crime Fiction 101. It's every episode of Justified without Timothy Olyphant or Carla Gugino to stare at. It's most every Jack Reacher novel, albeit dialed down to a 2 without Lee Child's explosive body count or cockadoodie conspiracies. I didn't hate Shifty's Boys, I just wasn't provided any reason to continue reading it and not watch Justified.
My introduction to the fiction of Eli Cranor is Don't Know Tough. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the beMy introduction to the fiction of Eli Cranor is Don't Know Tough. Published in 2022, this novel blipped on my radar via a CrimeReads article of the best noir fiction of the year. Set in the fictional Arkansas town of Denton, as near as I can tell, the story involves a deeply troubled high school star football player environmentally, culturally and lots of other ways predisposed to violence standing up to his mother's abusive boyfriend, who lives with them in their trailer, and the efforts of the new football coach to cover up the boy's crime.
I abandoned this at the 20% mark.
In his ten rules of writing, Elmore Leonard cautioned against overdosing on patois and Cranor demonstrates why, including chapters in which the football player tells his story in his own dialect. His vernacular reads like rural Black but it's soon clarified that the boy and his family are white, hailing from a part of Arkansas closer to Memphis where the poor white folks speak the same as the poor Black folks. Whatever the dialect is or who's using it, I quickly grew exhausted by it. This is the sort of thing that gets tiring in between quotation marks, much less entire chapters.
Now it game time, and Coach still letting me run through the tunnel and the paper the cheerleaders spent all day coloring. Even say he gonna let me walk out on the field at halftime for Senior Night. But I ain't told Momma. He'd wanna walk too, and I'll be damned if He get to walk out there like He my daddy. I stay in the back. The band blow they horns, but they ain't blowing them for me. Used to blow them loud and sing the fight song when Billy Lowe run across the goal line.
There’s a wide gulf between despicable characters I need to keep an eye on and despicable characters I can ignore. This novel is full of the latter. I did not like the characters, not because I disapproved of them, but because their problems weren’t compelling. The football player is a menace, despised by his teammates for assaulting them in practice or during games. The coach is a doormat who was fired for posting a losing record at his previous job and has lost the locker room of his new one. The kids he wants to mentor think he’s a joke and so did I. He's under the thumb of his manipulative wife, who hates Arkansas and wants to win at all costs so they can find opportunity elsewhere.
I also didn't get the sense that any of these characters lived and breathed or even knew a lot about football. Not that I want a book to read like a John Madden play-by-play but based on their preparation or performance on the gridiron, they don't seem very competent at football. These characters could just as well been a wrestler and wrestling coach and wrestling coach's wife for all the football IQ they muster.
The description from the publisher compares the novel to the work of Megan Abbott, but in Abbott's expertly tailored noir fiction, where immortality is afoot in gymnastics or drill team or high school STEM programs, I learn something about those activities and the psychologies of those competing in them at the highest levels. I didn't feel this author had done his homework enough to competently place me in the world of small town football or invest me in his characters....more
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women iMy Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women in peril'' thrillers to focus on ladies who are amateur sleuths. Till the Cows Come Home is my introduction to author Judy Clemens and her series featuring Stella Crown. Published in 2011, I abandoned this at the 20% mark (six chapters) and that was with healthy skimming. This breezy rural mystery is one of the ten worst books I've read since joining Goodreads in 2014. It's bad. Howlingly bad. Ready to give it a pass if an eighth grader wrote it bad.
Whenever I quit a book, I accept some responsibility for not properly vetting it. There is material that receives rave reviews that I am not the demographic for. With Till the Cows Come Home, I confirmed that this was not a cozy mystery and in fact, was regarded by some as a pig pen of human toil. The plot involves a young, single farmer in Pennsylvania named Stella Crown who begins to suspect that the illness which killed a neighbor was no accident and the death of some of her livestock is not natural either. She investigates. Could this be Smilla's Sense of Snow in a cornfield? It doesn't seem cozy to me.
I'm not going to make any cow shit jokes here but the writing in this novel is terrible. It's a first person account and Stella comes to the page very, very casual and commonplace. I get that she doesn't practice international law. She's introduced birthing a calf, but rather than thinking or speaking like a hard working woman who knows more about animal husbandry or weather than I ever will, Stella expresses herself like she was raised on daytime TV and can't turn away from The Maury Povich Show to articulate a thought that isn't expressed on television daily.
I heard the door of Howie's apartment close, and I watched as he descended his stairs. By the look on his face, he was still tickled at me. Oh well. Life would go on.
Without exchanging so much as a syllable, we climbed into my truck and drove the quarter mile to the Derstines' house. I parked to the side of the lane so I wouldn't block anybody, then paused to look at the small group on the porch.
"Ready?" I asked.
Howie grunted and opened the door.
The walk up the lane was too short, and I soon found myself giving Claire Derstine, Toby's mother, a hug. She held on for a long time, and I tried not to feel claustrophobic.
"I'm really sorry," I said when she let go.
There's a lot of wasted ink on the page, lots of repetition. Characters are incessantly thanking and apologizing. "Thanks" and "sorry" don't show up on every page, but enough to stand out. There are a lot of pleasantries or pedestrian dialogue that could easily be cut. Clemens might be trying to mimic a real conversation, maybe, but then hits my greatest raw nerve in fiction by having characters refer to each other by name, constantly, which sober human beings never do. "I didn't see where the cow went, Howie, did you?" "I sure didn't, Stella. Maybe Ma knows." Barf.
The title is awful. The main character's name doesn't fit her ("Stella Crown" lands pretty urban or even cosmopolitan on my ears, like Stella Du'Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire or Thomas Crown in The Thomas Crown Affair). And this surprised me, but I did not like the author conveying how vile the local land speculator is by joking that he only likes Republicans. Using a political party, any political party, to characterize someone is so lazy. There are ways to convey that your bad guy is a psychotic individualist with fascist sympathies without calling out their political party. It's poor marketing--alienating half your readers--but worse it's just bad writing.
While reading, as brief as it was, I imagined Mackenzie Davis playing Stella Crown. It'd be a long way down from Black Mirror: San Junipero, Halt and Catch Fire and Station Eleven to this material. I'd change everything in the book except the main character's occupation and the name of her dog, and maybe the fact that she rides a Harley Davidson.
What is this?: The debut novel from screenwriter Scott Frank, who wrote the original screenplay Dead Again, which Kenneth Branagh directed and starredWhat is this?: The debut novel from screenwriter Scott Frank, who wrote the original screenplay Dead Again, which Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in. Frank added adaptations of the Elmore Leonard novels Get Shorty and Out of Sight. He recently adapted and directed The Queen's Gambit as a mini-series for Netflix.
When was it published?: 2016
When did I abandon it?: 17% mark
Why?: In this poor man's Elmore Leonard, we have a hitman from back East, a female LAPD detective and a gangbanger who cross paths while L.A. is swarmed with aftershocks of a major earthquake. The earthquake prologue grabbed me--who doesn't want to see L.A. shaken by a major earthquake--but when it comes to characters, it felt like only Robin Hood, Maid Marian and the Sheriff of Nottingham have been around longer. I've seen these characters time and time and time again and while Frank attempts to color them in--the hitman is a schlub, the gangbanger is a math and science wizard--I was bored all to hell.
There is an extremely incredibly very long scene in which the hitman loses his car after a job and while wandering around North Hollywood after dark, comes across the gangbanger and his partners terrorizing a male jogger at gunpoint. Ultimately, the hoodlums catch the hitman watching and begin to threaten him too. In reality, a mugging incident like this would be over in what would feel like 15 seconds, but Frank just goes on and on and on with it. There's nothing fresh or exciting about it at all. I didn't care what was going to happen next or whether the female cop was going to piece anything together.
Give me a break with these archetypes: the hitman going on a job, the female detective proving herself, the hoodlum outwitting the others with uncommon intelligence. With this type of book--and Elmore Leonard wrote his share of mediocre ones--I want to be tickled from the start, thrilled from the start, or puzzled from the start. Anything that fails all of those criteria is just shooting for lukewarm junk. The earthquake swarm was fresh. Why not make the protagonist a public safety expert, or structural engineer, or seismologist? What if the earthquake concealed a crime? I'm not suggesting those would make a better book, but it would've been one I haven't seen already.
Credit where credit is due: Frank also co-adapted Minority Report for Steven Spielberg, which is a movie that never got its due, perhaps because its climax is pretty low wattage compared to most science fiction or spy movies, but I marvel at finding something new each time I watch it. I love a good alien, robot or time traveler in science fiction and Samantha Morton's empath is one of the best....more
John D. MacDonald has fast become one of my favorite authors. He was so prodigious throughout the 1950s and '60s that he wrote seven Travis McGee mystJohn D. MacDonald has fast become one of my favorite authors. He was so prodigious throughout the 1950s and '60s that he wrote seven Travis McGee mysteries--two of which he threw in the garbage upon completion--before consenting that his publisher Fawcett Books release the first one. I had some vague impression that The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything would be MacDonald's version of a Richard Matheson story. The high concept fantasy plot was there. "Boy inherits watch that can stop time." I'm convinced that MacDonald bet one of his buddies that he could write a 150-page book quicker than his buddy could read one. This is the result.
I was so confused by what I read that I took two days off and started over. The book didn't make much more sense on its second pass. Kirby Winter is a 32-year-old jackass whose Uncle Omar has died, leaving none of his $50 million estate to his heir, only a watch and a letter not to be opened for a year. Kirby is a hero in the Classic Keanu Reeves mold: he cannot buy a clue on what is going on around him. Rather than "whoa," Kirby often mumbles, "gawr," when not tripping over furniture. I can't stand invalid protagonists who seem to have difficulty tying their own shoes. How Kirby has lived as long as he has is the biggest mystery.
Let me turn things over to one of my writing instructors, playwright, screenwriter and film director David Mamet:
“I did a movie called Spartan and it’s with Billy Macy and Val Kilmer and Kristen Bell. It’s a pretty good movie. And there’s no narration in it. Somebody’s been kidnapped, you don’t know who she is. Somebody’s sent to find her, you don’t know who he is. And Macy paid me the highest compliment. He said, you know, there’s not one second of narration in that whole damned movie. That’s a great compliment, right?
Because anybody can write narrations. It’s why anybody can write television. Because it’s all basically narration. And one of the hallmarks of soap opera--which most television drama is--is two people talking about something that happened offstage. They don’t want anything from each other. So that’s the death of drama. And I tried to tell writers that when I was working on a television show, that phrase ‘As you know …’ Because, who are we talking to?”
In The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything, Kirby tells a strange woman he apparently met at his uncle's funeral all about himself. Why would a strange woman lavish so much attention on hapless Kirby, a dunce who didn't inherit a penny from Uncle Omar? The incongruity doesn't prompt Kirby to stop talking and question this, to act. Then the strange woman's niece shows up and starts berating Kirby. She's apparently a TV actress who the strange woman has gotten shitcanned from her job in order to come to Florida to spend time with her, which makes no sense considering the strange woman is in the middle of conning Kirby.
By now, we reach the 20% mark of the story. There's no watch, no magic. The author hasn't shown the reader anything, just let characters talk about things that occurred offstage. After the niece tells Kirby all about how conniving her aunt--the one she was willing to drop everything to come to visit in Florida-is, Kirby tells the niece all about his Uncle Omar, a high school teacher who mysteriously quit his job one day, went to Reno and won $100,000. If MacDonald had shown a young Kirby experiencing strange events at the home of his uncle, which he then puts out of his mind until the funeral many years later, then I'd be curious for Kirby to find out what's going on.
In MacDonald's story, characters talk and talk about stuff that happened offstage, but it didn't mean anything to me because I'd been given no opportunity to connect with anything emotionally. It's just writing. Really what it feels like is an author rushing through a first draft extraordinarily fast. Setting a scene up and writing action takes time, whereas two characters riding in a taxi and talking for 12 pages can be dashed off by a writer with a much weaker ear than John D. MacDonald in less than an hour. That was the impression I got here....more
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to the fiction of Liz Nugent. Published iThe Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to the fiction of Liz Nugent. Published in 2016, this contemporary thriller races off to a competent start. Nugent does stall her momentum a bit by alternating between three points of view--a Lady Macbeth type, a Mary Sue type and Lady Macbeth's teenage son, the bad, the good and the ugly--but that wasn't why I hated the book. This is the most generic use of ink and paper I can imagine, with mundane prose, leaden dialogue and inert atmosphere. I abandoned it at the 32% mark after Part One concluded.
The story begins with a woman named Lydia returning to the spot she's left her husband, a judge, parked on a deserted strand. He's strangled but not killed a young woman of ill repute whose clandestine meeting with the couple has gone real bad. Lydia finishes the job by grabbing a steering wheel lock and smashing the woman in the peanut. The couple bury her in their garden. Meanwhile, the victim's crusading sister Karen Doyle refuses to give up hope that her wayward sister may still be alive. Meanwhile, Lydia's overweight eighteen year old son Laurence quickly suspects his parents are the murderers of the missing girl.
I've been critical of novels that alternate between multiple points of view, but this was the least of my problems with Lying In Wait. I do believe that authors who hop from character to character with each chapter do this mostly for their own benefit, to keep themselves engaged during the arduous process of writing a novel, rather than because this scheme is something that people want to read, but I'm sure I've read a book or two where this worked fine for me.
The first real sign of trouble is how mundane every single sentence in the novel is. I know I'm in the hands of a good writer when paragraphs of jeweled prose, or acidic wit, or intriguing nuggets of info are dropped into my lap like a hot coal, a rambunctious kitten or a silver coin. I want that wonder. I want to be jolted out of my work day, made to think or feel something unexpected. I open a novel because I'm bored. Authors should not bore me more.
Andrew had been a very good husband until just a year previously. For twenty-one years, our marriage had been solid. Daddy had been very impressed with him. On his deathbed, Daddy had said he was relieved to be leaving me in good hands. Andrew had been Daddy's apprentice at Hyland & Goldblatt. He had taken Andrew under his wing and made him his protégé. One day, when I was about twenty-five, Daddy had telephoned me at home and told me that we were having a special guest for dinner and that I should cook something nice and get my hair done. "No lipstick," he said. Daddy had a thing about makeup. "I can't stand those painted trollops!" he would say about American film stars. Daddy's views could be extreme. "You are my beautiful daughter. No point in gilding a lily."
The novel is set in Dublin in November 1980 for reasons I couldn't determine. It could've easily taken place in any city or town of any era. Ideally, a murder mystery should tell me a story about the place and time the crime occurred. Who are the people of that place? What's it like to live there? How do politics or culture of the day determine how the body got there and how the killer is found? Nugent seemed disinterested.
Rewriting the novel while I was reading it, I would've focused on Karen Doyle, changing her unfortunate first name of course, and staying with her. What's Karen up to in Dublin of 1980? She wouldn't have had an easy life, with Ireland technically a Third World country in the '80s. What's she do to make ends meet? What are her flaws? What is she good at and how does that aid her as she launches an amateur investigation?
What novel can I run for cover with after quitting this one?
Liz Nugent was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1967 and currently resides there with her husband, a musician and sound engineer. She's written for television, radio drama, broadcast, and published four novels.
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In the event you missed them: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm reading detective fiction and stealing everything of value. My story takes place in L.A. of the early '90s, bAs research for a novel I'm writing, I'm reading detective fiction and stealing everything of value. My story takes place in L.A. of the early '90s, but I'm picking up hats and trying them on like we did before the pandemic. Given that Steph Cha devotes much of the first 5% of her debut novel Follow Her Home to women's footwear, I didn't get far with this one, abandoning it after one chapter. The focus on shoes wasn't the problem. This novel is two left shoes.
The story takes place in present day L.A. and debuts Juniper Song (the only positive note I can give Cha is that her protagonist has a good name), a "twentysomething" who still surrounds and involves herself in the lives of her college pals, one of which, Luke, suspects his father of cheating on his fragile mother with an incessantly cute office girl named Lori Lim (they're Korean). Wanting to help him out, Song is on the case, guided by her devoted following of the fiction of Raymond Chandler and his private detective Philip Marlowe.
There are major problems with this novel in paragraph 1 on page 1.
It was about ten o’clock on a Friday in mid-July, the Los Angeles night warm and dry, the only wind rising from the whoosh and zoom of traffic on Rossmore. I was wearing a slinky black dress, black patent leather platform pumps, silver cascade earrings, and a black lambskin clutch. I was perfumed, manicured, and impeccably coiffed. I was everything a half-employed twentysomething should be on the sober end of a Friday night. I was calling on an open bar at Luke's new apartment, ready to spend a little time and respectability on a blurry and colorful evening.
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My first problem is telling instead of showing. Cha doesn't show us that Song is half-employed. Showing us would demand taking the effort to, say, show her character arrive in a beater. Or worse, a bus. How embarrassing. Or maybe she's counting out change to pay her taxi driver (the novel was published in 2013, in a time before Uber) and comments to her driver that her employment situation is dire. What about party guests cracking at her vehicle or her wardrobe or her shoes? Nah, that would require too much effort. It's way easier to just tell the reader that Song is half-employed.
In the second sentence we have a wardrobe breakdown. Before her job, her thoughts, her name even, we get her fashion taste. I don't have a problem with authors focusing on whatever they're interested in. Tom Clancy wrote about submarines. Cha seems to love shoes. Fine. Write The Hunt For Red October of women's shoes. What do a woman's shoes say about her? Where is she going? Where's she been? (Thanks, Forrest Gump!). Perhaps Song makes her own shoes. Maybe she uses this expertise to unlock doors that idiots at the party have closed to them. Nah. Too much effort. Cha would rather flip the catalog to the next page.
So far we have signs of a lazily written and superficial book. Song proceeds to have a conversation with Luke that only two characters in a plot could have, not two people at a party with hip hop blaring and guests shouting over the music. Luke is concerned that his father might be cheating on his mother with the drunk girl HE WAS JUST TALKING TO. First of all, this struck me as a woman writing a male character as if he was more like a she. Young men don't often dwell on whether or not their girlfriends are cheating, much less their father. Nor do most of us, at that age, worry about how it might affect our relationship with Dad.
Second, if Luke had suspicions about Lori, why not investigate himself? It's his apartment, his party. She is pretty wasted. Why not drive her home, get her talking? Why involve Song? Well, maybe he's a sensitive guy. Maybe he's been trying for a month to get answers from Lori and gotten nowhere. Maybe Cha could've shown Luke struggling to get answers out of Lori, or Song observing her friend acting strange. Nah, too much effort. Raymond Chandler opened each paragraph like a safe, but how many authors read Chandler?
I was thirteen when I read The Big Sleep. It was my introduction to Marlowe, to hard-boiled detective fiction, to the very notion of noir, and I could not get enough. As I grew my last three inches, I went from book to book, consuming everything that was Philip Marlowe. I savored his words, studied his manners and methods. I carried him with me like an idol.
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Whoops! Cha has a crush on Raymond Chandler and his world weary private dick Philip Marlowe so much that not only is Luke's apartment building named the Marlowe, but Song launches into an admission of how much she adores Chandler and has patterned her life off Marlowe. This would be like Chandler devoting the first two chapters of The Big Sleep to how dope Arthur Conan Doyle was, or Marlowe talking about the exploits Sherlock Holmes. Starting a book talking about other books seems more like blogging than fiction writing.
I almost forgot to mention that the novel begins at a party in which no one throws a punch, gets sick as a dog, disappears into a closet with a party guest for rude and unprotected sex, gives in to anger, excess or lust or does anything that celebrates the human condition in all its messy glory. Maybe Cha should've included some John Steinbeck on her reading list.
Finally, it seems the novel is set up with very low stakes. Finding out whether Luke's dad is cheating on his mom is not very compelling. Sure, he mentions his mother's unstable health, but it's not as if Luke is going to fix that by finding out his dad is screwing an intern. Maybe the case becomes more complex. Maybe Lori ends up dead. But on the basis of Chapter 1, I had no interest in continuing a novel that tells instead of shows and is mainly about a better mystery writer and shoes.
I'm abandoning this effort by Stephen King. Published in 2013 by Hard Case Crime, the pulp-styled crime label owned by Titan Books, I picked it up at I'm abandoning this effort by Stephen King. Published in 2013 by Hard Case Crime, the pulp-styled crime label owned by Titan Books, I picked it up at the library wanting a King book to read and fell in love with the cover art by the legendary Robert McGinnis Glen Orbik. I should've known that redheads are nothing but trouble. The story is set in the 1970s in the aforementioned North Carolina amusement park and is 115 pages of schmaltz and self-indulgence leading up to a whodunit that I never made it to. King might have wanted to hang out in a fun park but gave me no compelling reason to with this story. He breaks one of his own writing rules: "You must not come lightly to the blank page."
What else can I do to entertain myself here?
My favorite TV redhead is Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) from The X-Files.
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Who is Robert McGinnis? A cartoonist in the late 1940s, his first cover illustrations appeared in 1956 for True Detective and Master Detective magazines. He produced his first paperback cover in 1958 and never stopped working. The creation of the "McGinnis Woman" often involves long limbs, allure and a sleazy mystique. He became a go-to artists for private dick novels like the Mike Shayne series, the Carter Brown adventures, but Perry Mason as well. His work illustrating movie posters ranged from the James Bond series, Breakfast At Tiffany's, Barbarella and The Odd Couple.
My introduction to the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones is The Last Final Girl. Published in 2012, this love letter to slasher movies was a free downloMy introduction to the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones is The Last Final Girl. Published in 2012, this love letter to slasher movies was a free download with Amazon Prime. Like disco, I grew up on the genre, Halloween being the progenitor and a handful of copycats noteworthy for varying the formula in interesting ways. Like disco, the slasher movie largely died out in the early '80s, which hasn't stopped authors who grew up on them from styling slasher novels that are either wall-to-wall with tongue-in-cheek gore, or obnoxious pop culture references. This novel is #2 and a floating pool turd at that. I abandoned it at the 20% mark.
Let's run down the things that make this the biggest bag of oderous excrement I've ever downloaded, shall we?
1. Jones writes as if jotting down a transcript for a movie playing in his head. I thought maybe this would turn out to be a student film experiment and the prose would kick in at some point, but it never did. Here's a sample:
--> the video cabinet.
It's a mix of VHS and DVD, heavy on the VHS.
We linger. It's all the Golden Age slashers, and beyond, and before, and besides. A horror library, so complete it hurts.
Like transcripts, I often found it difficult to follow what the fuck was going on. Jones' reliance on smart aleck shot descriptions or film editing flourishes to try to tell a story completely alienated me.
2. The jokey 'tude that hangs over every sentence. Jones dumps an entire Blockbuster Video card's worth of film references onto the reader--
The answer comes from the stall: "Little miss obscure reference is talking about Adrian Zmed."
The stall door creaks open slowly and it's a drop-dead gorgeous woman of a girl, wearing a Catholic schoolgirl outfit that's about two sizes too small.
She's sitting on the toilet, angling a line of smoke to the levered-open window, an actual dagger in her hands. She's using it to idly carve into the stall wall, above the toilet paper dispenser. It doesn't interrupt her speech, though: "From TJ Hooker, you know? Think a slightly older Patrick Dempsey. Zmed got shot every other episode, but it never really mattered Usually in the shoulder, too, just like our homecoming queen in-waiting."
"I'd say he's more like if Dempsey and C. Thomas Howell had a lovechild," Izzy says, not unimpressed here.
I can picture Jones sitting at Tierra Madre Coffee, wearing a beanie and sipping a decaf soy latte with an extra shot and cream with the name "Spartacus" written on the cup and cackling over his PC. Bully for him. I wanted to throw his beanie into traffic while he was still wearing it.
3. Teenagers in present day referencing the movies, television or music of the author. Not only do these characters reference pop culture they couldn't possibly have been exposed to by high school, they ping-pong antiquated references off each other like Quentin Tarantino and his bros at Video Archives in the late '80s.
"But Joe, it's supposed to be a joke. Lighten up."
This leads me to the fourth and final engine failure on this puddle jumper--
4. Joke books piss me off to no end. Now, I could see Douglas Adams standing trial for writing joke books, so it's possible to craft an imaginative one while throwing out one clever witticism after another. Once I see that the author doesn't want to be taken seriously, that he's joking, that he's gone to the page lightly, I can't take the characters seriously. If I can't take the characters seriously, nothing that happens matters. Humor, for me, has to be based on character and grounded in some reality the writer establishes. I don't like jokes. This novel is obnoxious as fuck.
The sheriff's waterlogged Playboy.
As it passes, the boys are taut on that glossy centerfold girl, her eyes smoldering up at them. And the rest of her.
"Look at the articles on that one," one of them says.
Before this shitty little shuttle-fucking piece of shit airline hits the swamp, I'll share one final complaint:
5. Who'as ever gazed into a body of water, noticed a Playboy magazine floating by and cracked a joke about it? Or tried to fish it out of the water? Last I checked, porn was readily available on the Internet and it isn't soaking wet. This is what also drove me up the wall about this novel. What the fuck did this author imbibe and I can get some for the next holiday weekend?
The Last Final Girl reads like a manuscript that some dude wrote in 1994 after mixing his prescription Ativan with Jägerbomb. He slips into a coma for twenty years and subsequently, the Scream movies deconstruct the slasher movie while the Scary Movie movies spoof those movies, but the author's bros discover the manuscript and publish it while their bro is in a vegetative state, which is an improvement on the state he wrote this fucking thing in. I hated this novel. It is smarmy. It is lazy. Its ideas are derivative and communicated as if through a fog of antidepressants and douchebag alcoholic beverages.
I've never told a reader not to read something, to give the first page a taste test and see if maybe it's me and not you, but if it comes down to spending any money or effort acquiring this one, I'd turn back if I were you....more
My introduction to the fiction of Nathan Hill is his debut novel The Nix, a Great American Novel that at 620 pages, is a boat anchor. I came up for aiMy introduction to the fiction of Nathan Hill is his debut novel The Nix, a Great American Novel that at 620 pages, is a boat anchor. I came up for air and dropped it at 320 pages. Published in 2016, this literary epic is about a lot, mostly a reconciliation between a failed novelist named Samuel Andersen-Anderson and his mother Faye, who walked out on him and his father thirty years ago. Faye resurfaces during her fifteen minutes of fame chucking pebbles at a hardline governor running for president, which Samuel's publisher feels puts him in the unique position to crank out a tell-all memoir, if he can reconcile with his mother.
Oh, but this book is about so much more! Hill shares his opinion on the pitiful state of pop music, the ridiculous state of online gaming (a la World of Warcraft), the sad state of higher learning, the idiotic state of the 24 hour news cycle, the disgraceful state of publishing, etc. This all became very droll for me, not because I disagreed with Hill or didn't think he could write, but because I didn't want to read it. Elmore Leonard advised writers to cut out the parts of a novel that readers tend to skip. Leonard didn't mention anything specific about block paragraphs--that's more of a deal breaker for me.
Samuel always feels this way around his publisher: a little uneasy in comparison, a little derelict. Periwinkle looks about forty years old but he's actually the same age as Samuel's father: in his mid-sixties. He seems to be fighting time by being cooler than it. He carries himself in an erect and stiff and regal manner--it's like he thinks of himself as an expensive and tightly wrapped birthday present. His thin shoes are severe and Italian-looking and have little ski jumps at the tips. His waistline seems about eight inches smaller than that of any other adult male in the airport. The knot in his necktie is as tight and hard as an acorn. His lightly graying hair is shaved to what seems to be a perfect and uniform one-centimeter length. Samuel always feels, standing next to him, baggy and big. Clothes bought off the rack and ill-fitting, probably a size too large. Whereas Periwinkle's tight-fitting suit sculpts his body into clean angles and straight lines, Samuel's shape seems blobbier.
If you found that paragraph to be literary TNT, please don't let me dissuade you from reading The Nix. My eyes glazed over everything after the third sentence, which doesn't do what I want a good novel to do: tell me a compelling story. Hill expresses a lot of opinions but doesn't tell a story that I needed to read. A son doesn't need 620 pages to discover why his mother left him. He doesn't need 20 pages. Those who savor literary fiction might delight in the Writing here, but this book just wasn't for me. Point of view shifts from Samuel to an online gaming buddy to Faye put the novel in the "telling" mode rather than a "showing" mode. At this length, that's a lot of telling.
In the days before COVID-19, in a time when one could get a book signed and meet an author, I met Attica Locke at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. I In the days before COVID-19, in a time when one could get a book signed and meet an author, I met Attica Locke at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. I enthused on how brilliantly she brought the history and geography of our hometown of Houston to the page and she recommended Lot by Bryan Washington. This reminded me of Susan Straight: dark people overcoming poverty with language which is at times intoxicating but characters I'm already forgetting and no story I can remember. I quit this at the 20% mark. I'll let Roddy Doyle explain in his dazzling debut novel The Commitments, about a Dublin soul band.
--Brother Jimmy, said Joey The Lips. -- I'm worried -- About Dean.
-- Wha' abou' Dean?
-- He told me he's been listening to jazz.
-- What's wrong with tha'? Jimmy wanted to know.
-- Everything, said Joey The Lips. -- Jazz is the antithesis of soul.
-- I beg your fuckin' pardon!
-- I'll go along with Joey there, said Mickah.
-- See, said Joey The Lips. -- Soul is the people's music. Ordinary people making music for ordinary people. -- Simple music. Any Brother can play it. The Motown sound, it's simple. Thump-thump-thump-thump. -- That's straight time. Thump-thump-thump-thump. -- See? Soul is democratic, Jimmy. Anyone with a bin lid can play it. -- It's the people's music.
-- An' what's wrong with jazz? Jimmy asked.
--Intellectual music, said Joey The Lips. -- It's anti-people music. It's abstract.
-- It's cold an' emotionless, amn't I right? said Mickah.
-- You are. -- It's got no soul. It is sound for the sake of sound. It has no meaning. -- It's musical wanking, Brother.
I love jazz. In fact, I listen to it every day. Bryan Washington is playing jazz, but through no fault of his own, I'm playing in a Dublin soul band right now. I won't rate Lot because Washington is an excellent writer. I'm just not the audience for a language-focused novel. This book is beguiling echos filling the bottom of a well. There's no humor and not much dignity among his characters, who often talk in fortune cookie platitudes. I need to read something that grabs me and pulls me into a real story. Readers in the mood for Susan Straight would likely jam to this....more
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