When I was in the middle of _A Long Reach_, I too had
different reactions.
Negative first, since that's what others have featured:
Stone's characters
are competent, but hardly engaging. We don't go much inside
them, and the
inside we see seems like psychology case study material. It's
nice to have
Linda to provide psychological profiling for Carol, for
instance, to give
her some coherence, but Linda's analysis simply points up how
Carol, like
most of the characters, is mainly a set of behaviors tied to
plot. Other
characters seem to speak their lines on cue, whatever the
situation calls
for. They're competent.
"Efficient" is another word I would almost use, except that
Stone's
character technique borders on the clumsey, and the
characters themselves
are a bit too touchy-feely for this hard-boiled fan. He uses
the
conventional "he said, she said," and "glancing toward him"
ways of
delivering a scene, whereas someone like Ellroy has picked up
the more
dramatic means honed by previous modernist writers.
Consequently, Stone's
characters--their manner of
fashioned, for all of the hip location details. At the same
time, his
characters are too "in touch" with feelings: "Jeff's a good
kid and I hate
to see him hurting," says Frank about the love-struck cop
almost killed by
Swallow's bomb. Uh huh. And I hate to see a Professional
stoop to
language like that.
But, to a strength: at the time Frank is summing up what
seems to
be the end of the case, the reader notices that there are
almost 100 pages
left. And that reader (well, me) has, after some initial
yawns,
driving hard to get to that climax, carried forward by plot
organization,
switching points of view, and good action scenes. Even while
I was
speeding toward the expected climax, ignoring the dissonant
details,
Streeter was "registering" details that would lead the plot
on, past page
135. The transition from plot one to plot two is nicely
done.
So I would urge, read _A Long Reach_ for the "rest of the
plot." Heck,
maybe the title refers to how far Stone extends the
storyline.
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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