>I understand. It's just my personal opinion that his
characters are >wooden
>and the prose pedestrian. <snip>. I certainly
don't
>mean to offend by offering a differing opinion and
will keep quiet on
>Pelecanos in future.
>Paul Miller
I don't think anyone has a problem with voicing contrary
opinions. It's hard to have a very substantive discussion
about your criticism, though, because it was almost entirely
conclusory. You criticized the methods used in the robbery -
which, as someone pointed out, are partly explained by later
plot developments - and you used some adjectives to describe
the characters and writing. Since you haven't said what you
find "wooden" about the characters or "pedestrian" about the
writing, the reasonalbe response for someone with an opposing
viewpoint is to say that they disagree. There's absolutely
nothing wrong with the type of opinion you posted, but I
don't think it can lead to a very fruitful discussion unless
you give some examples or define your terms a little better.
There's no reason that you should feel obliged to do this,
but it may be the best way to get the discussion
flowing.
I mean, personally, I found "Devil" to be one of Pelecanos'
weaker efforts, particularly in the portrayal of the bad guy
and in the climactic scene. There were a lot of things I
liked about the book, including the support group setup, the
developing friendship between Karras and Stefanos, and the
B-storyline case that Stefanos investigates. But I wasn't
wild about the book overall - I didn't believe in the bad
guys who seemed cartoonish (no more cartoonish than in "King
Suckerman" but in that book I took into account the spoof/
homage of seventies flicks; "Devil" seemed aimed to be a more
realistic book, yet the portrayal of these
eccentric-movie-bad-guy type characters took me out of it). I
also found the climax rather weak because it didn't work for
me in light of the experiences Karras and Stefanos have had
in earlier books (had to work at phrasing that one to avoid
spoilers, but I think I did -)
Carrie
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 09 Mar 2002 EST