I agree: the first hundred pages are hard to get through (I'm
at p.45). This has to do with Chabon's showing off his verbal
dexterity. I think there are more adjectives and ingenious
descriptive phrases than in whole novels by crime writers
from Chandler to Goodis to Pelecanos. Pulp paperback writers
had to keep to a certain word limit because their publishers
would not want to spend too much for paper. Maybe this was an
important factor in making classic noir crime fiction the
terse, suggestive form it was.
There is an allusion to Jerome Charyn in the Author's Note.
No doubt for Charyn's Isaac novels, and other stories of
crime and conscience with classic Diaspora moral themes by
19th century eastern European writers about the shtetl and
ghetto.
Several high toned reviews of YPL are very appreciative, and
also hard to get through. I suppose John Leonard of The _NY
Review of Books_ is a genius, but I always get lost in his
long lists of writers the subject of his review is similar
to, different than, or just obscure enough that Leonard's
readers have not read them. One would expect a progressive
magazine such as _The Nation_ would be appreciative of a
genre like crime fiction. However, Wm. Deresiewicz's
(positive) review ends up saying that the mystery novel genre
does not serve Chabon well. The reason is it it too, er,
rigid, and people know how things always turn out in the
crime novel genre. "...The dick will solve the murder, and
turn his life around, in the final chapter. . . . . The
appeal of [the detective story's] plot evaporates once you
learn how it turns out." Say what?
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