The Cut by George Pelecanos

 

This was a pretty decent crime novel, in some ways pretty thoroughly in a vaguely noir tradition, in other ways very of its time (2011 copyright) with all sorts of very specific landmarks both geographical and social that have almost certainly shifted over the past fifteen years. It's also Book One of a series, which is often the one book to read in a series if you're going to read any, and I can sort of see some of the groundwork being laid for future novels. It's intermittently violent, most of the characters don't have a lot of inhibition about that, and there are indications that whatever good any of the characters achieve will be kinda minimal, which is definitely a noir thing. The prose is pretty decent, though there are all sorts of odd insertions where Pelecanos informs us of what things (such as Greek words) mean, where the people in the novel are eating and why, that sort of thing, as though he doesn't trust readers to either know those things or fill in some gaps; it makes for some weird juddering. The characters are pretty well-distinct, and the story is reasonably plausible (though events might have made parts of it obsolete). If I come across others of Pelecanos' books that aren't deep in one series or another I might give them a go, but I'm not going to be exactly looking for them.

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

 

This book is simultaneously mundane almost to the point of nonexistence, and a very weird and difficult book for me to comment on. The POV character goes through some rough shit, about the same age I went through functionally the same rough shit, but his experience seems wildly more positive than mine--and the novel smells very strongly of autobiography, which doesn't make me inclined to like it better, if I'm honest: not because I dislike autofiction, but because it just makes me resent the author more than I resent the self-insert main, here. He got stuff he could turn into a bland bildungsroman, I spent four years disintegrating in my bedroom. Some of it is probably the ten years' difference (the novel is set in what has to be 1974, I went through my crap in 1985) and some of it is probably some fundamental difference between the kinds of suburbs. This is not a horrible novel, but I cannot muster the distance to say much else about it.

Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

 

This was a kinda precious little find in the library--a Block novel from the mid-1970s. I've read a few of the later Scudder novels (this series) after Scudder has done work in twelve-step programs, and it's ... a little weird to see him just drinking a lot, and having like a two-day blackout, but still being at least mostly functional. Well, functional within the limits of being Scudder, at least. The prose is solid with moments of sparkle, as one would expect from Block, and the story and characters are solid, and the 1970s New York of the novel feels suitably gritty and grimy and livable.

Bell Weather by Dennis Mahoney

 

So I read something else by Mahoney almost a year ago, and it was a really good horror novel. This is not a horror novel, but it also is really good--he seems to have written fantasy before he drifted toward horror, which is a reasonable thing to happen: a novelist writes the novels they happen to have. This is a weird fantastical 18th century, with stand-ins for England and France and America and Native Americans, but also lots of like ambient magic (mostly in plants that have no real-world parallels, but not exclusively). The prose here leans crisp and crackling, the characters are mostly well-realized and distinct, the storylines all ring reasonably true; there are probably thematic concerns with power and privilege and ambition and love (both familial and romantic); many of the textual and subtextual elements here put me in mind of Alix Harrow--no arrows of causality or influence, here, just noting the similarities--and someone who enjoys her novels might enjoy this.

While We Were Burning by Sara Koffi

 

This is not as good a book as the one I read the other night, it's ... stiff, I guess; it's also like astoundingly predictable, I kept reading well after I'd emotionally checked out, out of a morbid curiosity about whether it was going to be as flipping obvious as it looked. It was exactly as flipping obvious as it looked. I'm not really a big fan of stories about sociopaths doing sociopath things without much repercussions, and that's what this book is--at least it spends enough time in the head of the vengeful psychopath so you know why she's doing what she's doing. I'm pretty sure she's wrong, and I'm pretty sure she at least mostly knows it. The fact she's a little on the omnicompetent side is a turn off. The novel wants to say all kinds of things about race and class and privilege and all-a-that but it's so rigid and clumsy that it mostly fails at that. Oh, well.

The Divide by Morgan Richter

 

This has a lot in common with David Gordon's *Behind Sunset*, both being about people on the fringes of some part of what people think of as "Hollywood" digging into things, but this is much less on the lines of a period piece, and though it doesn't involve sex work as such it manages to be if anything grimier--this is not a novel that looks at the movie biz through any kind of rose-colored glasses, not even a little, and most of the people in it, even the Hollywood-successful ones, come off as grasping and as sort of clean skins wrapped around streaks of dirt. This is also, at least toward the end, an altogether weird novel, in ways I'm surprised any relatively major publisher (or imprint thereof) went with. The authorial voice crackles and sparkles with wit, the characters are amazingly distinct from each other, the LA it depicts is suitably rundown and kinda hollow. Has interesting things to say about the intersections and interactions and tensions between commerce and art, in ways that reflect both older Gen X-ish attitudes and more current ones. This is a really, really good novel, I hope Ms. Richter writes many more.

The Caretaker by Ron Rash

 

Yet another relatively skinny novel, yet another stunningly dense narrative. Impressively well-constructed and well-told, a story about a family that is so unwilling to live with their son's choices that they're willing to set their relationship with him on fire. Well, to be fair, their actions had a fuse of indefinite length, but the outcomes of the parents' choices were inevitable almost the instant their plans started taking narrative shape. A less violent novel than I would have expected, just the two instances of real violence, one an act of war and the other years' worth of enough paying off in a billiards hall. The prose hums like a live wire, the dialogue carries weight like a locomotive. Really a superb novel.