Oct. 9, 2024
I’ve been reading a lot lately about a new thriller written by a darling of the literary elite. It’s up for a major book award and received a ton of rave reviews.
Now, I’m hardly a member of fiction’s intelligentsia, but I thought it might be interesting to see what a highbrow genre novel looked like. So I read the first few pages.
Oh. My. God.
Turgid, self-absorbed, overwritten, smug, self-indulgent.
It did absolutely nothing to draw me into whatever the story was (which, according to one major critic, is basically nonexistent) or make me want to keep turning the pages.
It a weird way, it felt as if the author was trying to convince people (read: the literati) of their vast skills. It screamed, “I AM A WRITER!”
But that was unnecessary given that their previous novels were all the rage among smart people, and by all accounts, deservedly so.
As for me, I just wanted to jam knitting needles in my eyes.
I don’t get it.
The “reviewers of record” shower praise on this kind of pretentiousness and for the most part ignore popular thriller fiction – much of which is infinitely better than this. More readable. More engaging. More accessible.
Apparently there’s a caste system, and popularity is at the bottom level, the low working class, manual laborers.
Reading the revered novel in question – or, perhaps better stated, slogging through those first few pages – I was reminded of the great Mickey Spillane, who famously said, “The first chapter sells the book. The last chapter sells the next book.”
Suffice it to say, I won’t be buying this one. As to the next one, well, that goes without saying.
Meanwhile, I just finished another Ross Thomas and a Donald Westlake, and bought a Charles McCarry classic. No knitting needles required.
Comments