I’m reading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series in semi-random order. They’re pretty formulaic but quite often provide a hearty belly-laugh or two. What I didn’t expect was this novel, which from the very beginning you can tell is somewhat different: there are long paragraphs, some which go on for half a page! This was the fourth book of his that I read, and I wasn’t truly familiar with his entire range yet; but I was so used to pages and pages of one-line wise-guy dialog that it seemed like I’d strayed somehow into another author’s work with the exact same characters.

This was Parker’s 20th novel, published in 1993, and it just had more weight to it that the later ones that I’d read so far: the plot, the psychological depth, and the just-plain-old drama and pathos (in the best sense of those words). Also, I’d already started catching the literary allusions, so when I got to the end of Chapter 45 and saw this line, I just had to look it up:

Human voices wake us, and we drown.

Sure enough, it’s also the last line of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock.” Not only was it completely appropriate to the action, but it pushed the over into it’s on special category.

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Yes, it’s The Artist’s Way and Vein of Gold author — telling me how to avoid making art? OK, I’ll bite.

So I did. And then I threw the book across the room.

I really hate this book. I mean I really really hate it. I hate it so much that I bought a copy and sent it to my brother with a note that said “this book really pissed me off; I’m wondering if you have the same reaction.”

Well, he did. Except he said “thank you for the awesome book” etc.

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Ever since someone said that phrase to me in the lobby of the Living Computer Museum in Seattle (a place that offers many such moments for anyone who’s worked in high tech), I’ve been on the lookout for a chance to use it myself. Thanks to Reading Like a Writer, I now can. In the first chapter, where the author is defining “close reading,” she mentions that her French lit classes used an equivalent term: explication de texte. 

And what a delicious Proustian moment it was, to read that phrase. I was swept away, swooning, to a wine-soaked summer French Intensive at UC Santa Cruz–so many, many years ago. Thank you, Francine Prose.

I’ve been reading Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series–crime stories set (mostly) in Germany during the Third Reich and its aftermath. It’s serious historical fiction, but the main character is a hard-boiled wise-cracking detective, delightfully written and howlingly funny at times, even when his smart remarks get him in trouble with the Nazis (whom he hates, and secretly works against every chance he gets).

I knew Kerr was modeling Bernie’s character and voice on 40’s crime fiction. After all, the first three Bernie Gunther novels were reissued in a one-volume Penguin edition under the title Berlin Noir. Curious to see just to see how much of a resemblance there really was, I picked up a copy of The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlow story.

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These aren’t bad books necessarily; some of the plot elements do verge over into space opera territory, and not in a pleasing or fresh way like (for example) the Ann Leckie books. But there’s just something about the overall effect — not a seamless immersive whole but a too-present sense that you can just see and hear the clanking machinery that supposedly makes the whole thing work. I always want to read the next book in the series when I finish, but just in a vaguely curious way, not like I’m bereft at leaving the world or hungry to return to it like some other authors.