Category Archives: Fiction

Deadly Edge by Richard Stark

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This time, tough guy Parker steals the cash from a rock concert. He and his colleagues get away with the loot, but there’s a loose end and two bad guys find out about the job. They go after Parker and the rest of his gang. As usual, they should have stopped before they got to Parker: “If someone double-crossed him in a job, tried to take Parker’s share of the split or betray him to the law, everything else became unimportant until he had evened the score”.

This is a typical Parker novel, more plausible than some. The author (real name: Donald Westlake) builds suspense by shifting between Parker’s perspective and his girlfriend’s. She gets into a serious jam and is left hanging while we backtrack to Parker, who can’t immediately come to her aid.

Parker is the perfect guy to have on your side if you have a problem with a couple of dangerous, greedy malcontents. The foreword to the novel says that “in some ways, Parker is the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, the consummate hard-toiling craftsman whose craft just happens to be robbery” — and the mayhem that’s part of the craft in Parker’s universe.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

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Growing up in California, surrounded by towns with names like Santa Monica and San Bernardino, it was easy to assume that The Bridge of San Luis Rey was set in California in the 20th century. The novel is actually set in Peru in 1714. A major bridge between Lima and Cuzco collapses and five people fall to their deaths. A priest wonders why God decided these particular people should die, spends six years looking into their lives and writes a book telling what he learned.

Unfortunately, only the first and last chapters of this short novel refer to the priest, his search for meaning and his book. The other chapters are written in the voice of an omniscient narrator who explains how these five unfortunate people ended up on that bridge on that day. 

One of the victims is a neurotic aristocrat; another is her servant. Another is a neurotic young man, born an orphan and a twin. The last two are an older man, the mentor of a neurotic actress, and the actress’s young son. It seems unlikely that there were so many neurotic people in Peru in 1714, but since the novel was written in 1927, perhaps Thornton Wilder was influenced too much by Freud. None of the characters are especially interesting; most are especially annoying. The language of the novel suggests its setting and time period, but there are too many references to supposedly famous Spaniards and Peruvians whose names (real or fictitious) will mean nothing to a modern reader.

In the foreword to this edition, the novelist Russell Banks claims that The Bridge of San Luis Rey is “as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature”. I thought it was tedious and the characters were unconvincing. Reading about their psychological turmoil seemed pointless.

At the end of the novel, Wilder writes: “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five shall have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten….There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning”. It’s a worthy conclusion, but not one that’s demonstrated in the pages of this disappointing book.  (4/18/13)

Speedboat by Renata Adler

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Speedboat isn’t really a novel. It’s more like a collection of extremely short short stories, some featuring the narrator — a New York journalist/academic — and her social circle, and some describing random events that represent the modern world, circa 1975. You could say it’s a kaleidoscopic array of vignettes. It’s enjoyable but not very involving. 

Even though it was written some time ago, it’s remarkable how current the book is. There isn’t much missing, except for the Internet and cell phones. (And a plot.)  (4/8/13)

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

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I promised to read this book as a favor for someone. It’s a novel, or a collection of interconnected short stories, about the Vietnam War. The author was an infantryman in Vietnam. The book is much admired (a “book of the century”, a Pulitzer finalist, etc.). 

Some of it seems to capture what it must have been like to be in Vietnam, especially the first chapter, which is excellent. But I wouldn’t have finished it, except for the promise I made. There is too much exaggeration. Too much of it is over-written. It’s repetitious. A description of childhood memories is unbelievably detailed. It reminded me of what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

Here is one example, a quotation from a letter supposedly written to the author by a fellow soldier: 

“The guy wants to talk about it but he can’t … If you want, you can use the stuff in this letter. (But not my real name, okay?) I’d write it myself except I can’t ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can’t figure out what exactly to say.”

People writing letters in the 1970s either wrote them by hand or used a typewriter. In neither case were they able to write in italics. And I bet that nobody but an English professor would write “okay” instead of “ok” or “o.k.”. 

The Things They Carried is fiction that too often doesn’t ring true.  (3/22/13)

The Long March by William Styron

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The Long March is a short novel that tells the story of a forced march through the South Carolina countryside by a group of Marines. World War II has been over for several years and many of the Marines are in the Reserves. They’ve grown accustomed to civilian life but have been called back because of the situation in Korea. The officers in charge of the march are career officers. The two central characters in the novel are Reserve officers who hate being in the Marines again and especially hate the idea of marching 36 miles back to their base. The story is suspenseful, since it’s not clear who will be able to finish the march. Most of the Marines don’t. Some decide that they have to.  (12/26/12)