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What would Mickey say?



Oct. 9, 2024


I’ve been reading a lot lately about a new thriller written by a darling of the literary elite. It’s up for a major book award and received a ton of rave reviews.

 

Now, I’m hardly a member of fiction’s intelligentsia, but I thought it might be interesting to see what a highbrow genre novel looked like. So I read the first few pages.

 

Oh. My. God.

 

Turgid, self-absorbed, overwritten, smug, self-indulgent.

 

It did absolutely nothing to draw me into whatever the story was (which, according to one major critic, is basically nonexistent) or make me want to keep turning the pages.

 

It a weird way, it felt as if the author was trying to convince people (read: the literati) of their vast skills. It screamed, “I AM A WRITER!”

 

But that was unnecessary given that their previous novels were all the rage among smart people, and by all accounts, deservedly so.

 

As for me, I just wanted to jam knitting needles in my eyes.

 

I don’t get it.

 

The “reviewers of record” shower praise on this kind of pretentiousness and for the most part ignore popular thriller fiction – much of which is infinitely better than this.  More readable. More engaging. More accessible.

 

Apparently there’s a caste system, and popularity is at the bottom level, the low working class, manual laborers.

 

Reading the revered novel in question – or, perhaps better stated, slogging through those first few pages – I was reminded of the great Mickey Spillane, who famously said, “The first chapter sells the book. The last chapter sells the next book.”

 

Suffice it to say, I won’t be buying this one. As to the next one, well, that goes without saying.

 

Meanwhile, I just finished another Ross Thomas and a Donald Westlake, and bought a Charles McCarry classic. No knitting needles required.

 

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