Fiction Finished Recently

Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto -- Eleven books down, two to go in A Series of Unfortunate Events, one of the drollest productions in the English language.

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End -- This recent acclaimed novel about a Chicago advertising agency during a time of layoffs is a real disappointment. Written mainly in the first person plural ("we" did this and "we" did that), but the book's somewhat inventive form can't make up for its deficits. It has a manner, a definite bag of tricks, but whatever point that manner can make is made early. The lapses in realism seem purposeless, the "characters" are cardboard, and there is no plotting to speak of, only observation. There are funny bits, to be sure, but those are not hard to come up with in depicting the business world.

Joe Gores, Interface -- Gores is highly rated as a thriller/detective novelist, and this item from the Seventies is somewhat renowned for its brutality and its twist ending. The twist isn't bad and the brutality is real, but Gores's prose is so poor that it took me forever to get to the end of the book. In a novel of motion, the movements need to be more adroitly described than, say, this:

"[The car] went past, on toward the next intersecting lane down the garage which was parallel to that which was sawhorsed."

That's not an unfair sample, either. The novel is full of sentences like that. I'm not saying prose quality is everything -- I admire the famously clumsy (but powerful) Theodore Dreiser, for example -- but it hampered my enjoyment here.

John Braine, Room at the Top --The basis of the famous 1959 film with Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret, Braine's first novel is quite marvelously accomplished and compelling, a standout among the rawly realistic British novels of that era.

Rex Stout, The Rubber Band -- Anyone who reads this blog for any length of time will become familiar with my Archie Goodwin obsession. Of all fictional characters, Nero Wolfe's sidekick and narrator is the one I would most wish to be like -- both in terms of breezy temperament and sartorial panache. (Timothy Hutton is a great Goodwin in the TV series.)

I can never seem to follow Nero Wolfe plots, in print or on television, but the plots are not the real attraction, which rests for me in Goodwin's persona, Stout's excellent style, and the "world" created in the books (as compelling as the world of Sherlock Holmes). Wonderful stuff.

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit -- I am a very serious Dickensian; I've even lectured on him (the origins of "A Christmas Carol," specifically). Martin Chuzzlewit, one of the Dickens novels least known to the general public, is a marvelous novel, no less a masterpiece than (say) David Copperfield.

Dorothy B. Hughes, The Blackbirder -- This reads like a Forties thriller that was made into a movie -- which happened with other Hughes titles, but not this one. It would still make a good movie; Angelina Jolie, take note, there's a plum role here for you. The weakness (unsurprisingly in this genre) is in the depth of characterization; but I was sufficiently impressed to want to take a look at other Hughes novels.

James Blish, They Shall Have Stars -- The characterization is also the weakness in this classic science fiction novel, the first in Blish's Cities in Flight tetralogy. Am I in for the long haul? Probably: I was on the fence about this novel, but it was (partially) redeemed by a surprise conclusion that pulled everything together. It is, I think, axiomatic that classic science fiction is more reflective of the past it was written in than the future it projects; more so than some fiction, it needs to be read historically.