Friday, March 6, 2009

Novels can be fun? Who knew?

Over at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum enthuses about three detective novels, specifically The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville), A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr and Year of the Dog by Henry Chang. Rosenbaum notes that he enjoyed reading the three detective novels, while he wasn't all that crazy about postmodern abortions like Giles Goat Boy and Infinite Jest . Rosenbaum's taste in crime fiction is predictably tame. I'd have been a lot more impressed if he'd been enthusing about Simenon or Westlake, but hey, at least it's an acknowledgement of genre writing.

SPOILER ALERT: Rosenbaum's article gives away what is undoubtedly a MAJOR PLOT POINT of the forthcoming A Quiet Flame, so if you're planning on reading that one you might want to skip this article. Not cool Rosenbaum.

2 comments:

Peter Rozovsky said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Peter Rozovsky said...

Hey, it's nice that Rosenbaum reads crime fiction, but I always feel a bit uneasy about such weighty discoveries of that which has been there all along.

With respect to your wistful yearning for Rosenbaum to have discovered Westlake, be careful what you wish for. I mean, were you really thrilled when William Kristol told the world that he was a Westlake junkie?
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