On 15 July 2002, Ed Poe wrote:
: I found the six or eight or however many view points Gores
used to be
: jarring, interrupting the flow of the story. Also, while he
was
: certainly likeable, the dialogue from the character who had
the speech
: impediment was incredibly disruptive.
I thought 32 CADILLACS was great. I think Gores is really
good with the large cast of characters (and the cons, and
humour, and action, and tension), and it shows in MENACED
ASSASSIN, too, which was recommended on the list and I read
last week.
MENACED ASSASSIN has the Gores style, but he does something
different this time, too: he fractures the narrative across
two years, and tells it in three interwoven streams. There's
the story of how a man's ex-wife is killed and what happens
afterwards, there's a lecture given by the man which takes
place about 18 months later, and there's commentary by an
assassin. The assassin talks about events in the first
stream, and the second stream is split up into chunks and
runs through the book until the first stream catches up with
it. At the same time, whenever Gores wants to explain more
about a character's past, he diverts the first stream off
into the past to explain how a gangster got into the mob, how
a Greek shipping magnate got his start, or anything else. The
effect was that Gores was almost telling the story all at
once, all times collapsed, and it was just the fact it was a
book that meant he had to order the events.
There are lots of different points of view in the book, but I
liked the way he jumped from one to the other, always pushing
forward, never letting it flag, but never resorting to cheap
cliff-hanging techniques.
NOTE: If you haven't read MENACED ASSASSIN, watch out for
spoilers if someone else is talking about it.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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