Apologies for the sparse posting of late. During the past couple of weeks I've repeatedly gone two or three days without even once thinking about blogging, an experience I had not experienced for many, many months. I've been busy with some RL stuff, and some work on another website that's still far from ready for public consumption, but mostly I've just been lazy, and devoting all/most of my writing time/energy to my nearing-completion novel.
The sad part is that I've got like 5 reviews all written up, or nearly written up, and could have been pasting those in for free content. I just forgot. So anyway, here's one of those, and I'd like to say there will be more blogging soon, but it's unlikely. We're doing our scuba class pool testing this weekend, and we're going to be in the water literally from 8am-4pm both Saturday and Sunday, learning all the basic skills to keep us from not dying once we're 60 or 80 or 100 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. I'll more-than-likely blog about that experience afterwards, but since I want to still get a few hours of work done on my novel each day, I will probably be prioritizing.
Besides, how fascinating would it really be to read about noobs trying on wetsuits and fumbling with their BCDs and weight equalization issues in a swimming pool? It'll be much more fun once we're doing the same thing in the ocean in 3 weeks, and at that point I'll be able to (with any luck) look back on this and laugh.
Anyway, to the aforementioned book review:
A crime thriller I read after seeing it highly-recommended in Entertainment Weekly. I wasn't disappointed, but I certainly wouldn’t give it the A- they did.
To the scores:
Caught Stealing, by Charlie Huston, (2005)
Plot: 7
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 6
I regularly see books recommended in the reviews of EW, and on the rare occasions that they overlap one of my areas of interest, I check to see if the Contra Costa County Library system has them, and if so I order them. The problem is that these books are usually brand new, and I therefore wind up on a wait list. And by the time the book finally comes to me, 3 or 4 months after I requested it, I seldom have any memory of the review, or even ordering the book at all. I always at least start reading them though, as much to fill my mind with the work of other writers as to enjoy the books themselves.
This one wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either, and I couldn't really say what would have made it better. It's supposed to be a thriller, but I never really felt much excitement, just a sort of sickness at the horrendous violence and regular scenes of torture and death. I never rooted for the main character, I didn't buy his slow turn from victim to slick criminal avenger, and the scenes that were supposed to be absurd, Tarentino-esque chases and escapes were so perfectly wacky and contrived that they didn't seem real.
The story is about Hank Thompson, a regular guy in NYC who agrees to take care of his neighbor's cat for a few days when the neighbor has to head out of town on an emergency visit to his sick father. Hank's a bartender and an alcoholic, and the day after he gets the cat he's beaten so badly by a pair of Russian mobsters that his kidney ruptures and he nearly dies. When he returns from the hospital he finds a key of some sort hidden under the blanket in the cat's bed, then gets so blindly drunk that he wakes up the next day unable to remember what he did with the key.
This becomes a problem when a bunch of low life gangsters turn up, led by a crooked cop who will do anything to Hank, or the cat, to find out where the key went. Hank and the cat are tortured (the cat torture scene probably caused umpteen readers to close the book and go no further), but Hank escapes and survives. Much madcap action continues, with Hank being repeatedly taken captive by two warring factions of criminals, working with one side and then the other, stalling and hiding the key, and so on. A huge stash of money eventually comes into play, Hank begins to harden and fight back, the impossibly-wonderful and doglike cat walks around in a cast, and plot twists ensue.
I think the raw story of this one had potential to be a noir masterpiece, and that the writing is what kept it from working, for me at least. I just never really cared about any of the characters, whether good or bad, and didn't sense much rising action. There is a climax, and a cute resolution, and the whole story takes place in just three days, as the baseball season ends and Hank's favorite team scratches and claws for a playoff spot.
Caught Stealing has a lot of nice elements, and the outline was probably brilliant; the author just isn't quite good enough to pull it off with a light touch, or gritty enough to make it sing with tension and thrills.
Or perhaps it's just me that never felt involved with the book or sympathetic towards the main character or much interested in the bad guy characters. Witness the book's
4/5 star rating from 30 reviews on Amazon.com, with most of the most-helpful reviews 5-star scores. Especially when you consider that most of the lower scores are from people who voted low solely because of the constant gratuitous violence.
As I scanned the reviews, I found myself gravitating most towards
this one-star review (link to the reviewer's page, since Amazon doesn't support direct links to individual reviews) since even though I don't agree with his score, I think his description is spot on.
A cartoon of a book, June 26, 2005
Reviewer: John R. Sumser
The level of violence in this book reminds me of Daffy Duck-Elmer Fudd cartoons, and the hero of this story (a child-man who can't get over high school disappointments) does a pretty good Daffy.
I get the sense the book was written in a week or two, by a bunch of people drinking beer in front of a computer, laughing and asking each other, "So, what should we make happen next?" Think, Jack Kerouac goes hard-boiled, and you'll have this book . . . which is quite a complement if you liked On the Road.
But I got bored by the whole single-sheet of paper challenge, and long before Caught Stealing was anywhere near resolved I gave up on the and-now-guess-what-happens approach.
It could be my problem. I read too many student papers with the first-this-happened-then-this-happened-then-this-happened as the structure to read it in my leisure time.
His last paragraph does a very good job summing up my reaction to the plot of
Caught Stealing, and in far fewer words. This book felt like a lot of imaginatively-weird, but loosely-related events that were all defensible on their own, but that didn't feel like a cohesive whole when grouped together, and that never felt like they were rising towards a climax. In part, I think the book's breakneck pace worked against it, since with a new crisis situation every chapter, there was never any time for introspection or cooling down. Readers/viewers need breaks from "action and more action" from time to time, or the impact scenes lose their impact. That definitely happened to me with this novel, since by the end I had no reaction at all to the escalating violence and drama, since that's all I'd read for the past 250 pages.
A feeling of cohesiveness and action that rises to a climax, rather than just bubbling along steadily isn't mandatory in a novel, or a film, but it certainly helps elevate the good ones above the average.
Labels: book review
