When you’re eighteen, rich, and have a month to kill in Beverly Hills, you have nothing to do but take drugs, have meaningless sex, and talk to your friends about nothing specific. At least that’s the situation Clay finds himself in during his Christmas break from college. He returns to Los Angeles from New...
Mysteries intrigue us and unsolved mysteries inspire us. As obsessed as we are with that age-old question, whodunit, we prefer not knowing, especially when the mystery is as shocking and gruesome as the murder of Elizabeth Short. In January 1947, Short was found in a vacant lot. Her killer had disfigured her face and...
Considering how long Dominick Dunne had been writing and the respect he had gained at it, I expected a better novel. I found the prose clunky, the dialogue stilted, and the plot uninteresting and loosely developed. I’m more forgiving about these issues with Too Much Money than normal, because it was Dunne’s final book....
In the study of fiction, we talk about “the willing suspension of disbelief.” It, along with imagination, is what the reader brings to the novel. It helps produce the trance we enter as we read, allows us to SEE the story rather than just READ it. Unfortunately, around the 75% mark, Everson took Siren...
We read Thomas Hardy today because he’s still relevant, but perhaps the issues that made him relevant in his time, due to the changing nature of the world, are different than the things that make him relevant in our time. The relevancy of The Well-Beloved, dealing with the superficial nature of romantic love, makes...
There is a philosophy in this novel, but I fear I’m not smart enough to grasp it. So I come back to it every few years, read it again, and puzzle over what it is that I’m reading. What I find in its pages is a emotional pot simmering on the stove. It looks...
Jay McInerney writes about characters on on the verge of insanity. They grip what little sanity they have left by a frayed rope that no doubt will soon break. In Story of My Life that character is Alison Poole, a twenty-year-old debutante living in New York, and who hangs out with other twenty-year-old debutantes,...
The last word in this novel is braiding, and in this word choice, Michael Dorris hints at how he saw the process of writing it, and how he expected the reading experience would be. The structure is three novellas combined into one novel. Each novella is told in the first person point of view...
