After Ike

[atcampbell]

My mother and I had a nice visit over the weekend. Today she returned home. Her house is undamaged, and all of her essential utilities are working. She feels much luckier than a lot of people in the Houston area.

At tonight's meeting of my book group, we discussed a novel that no one liked. We had a fascinating discussion of how and why it failed

Comments

[spikeiowa]

Glad to hear about your mother's good luck!

[encorecrazay]

I'll be down at the other end of the building with the Red Cross again on Wednesday, Glad your mother came through OK.

[renegade500]

Glad to hear that your mom's house is okay!

Interesting about the book - before this, I'd heard a number of good things about that book. Still on the fence if I want to try it.

[atcampbell]

I doubt that you'll like the book. It's a not-very-interesting-story told in an ineffective manner. The narrative is supposedly told from the point of view of an older woman relating her life's story, but we don't think any real person would tell stories this way. The author is clearly a fan of "literary" authors who break from normal rules of storytelling and grammar (Wolfe, Crowley, Pynchon). Unfortunately he hasn't mastered his writing craft well enough to break the rules effectively, and the story doesn't benefit from this unconventional story structure. There are various technical oddities about the book's writing, such as using italics for four different purposes: dialog, songs, poetry, and commentary from a person other than the narrator. The book raised some potentially interesting questions early, and none of them were satisfactorily answered. It's certainly ambitious, but we didn't find the book worked on any level. It's not nearly as good as Black Wine or The Princess of Roumania, two other literarily ambitious books that

[wedgeofspite]

Huh. We checked out the book from the library, but neither of us could get through it. And by not get through it, I mean we threw in the towel only a few pages in. Instead I re-read Blackburn :-)

I'd wondered if you'd had family staying with you. Glad to hear your mother's home is all right.