(Because it’s the middle of the week, but it feels like the end of something…)

Review Blitz: The following novels/authors in about 100 words each:

The Road: I almost got sick of the whole voice about 2/3 of the way through. How many different ways can you say “everything is dead and gut-wrenchingly hopeless”? I kept it up because No Country is good. ATPH is good. But in The Road I think he overdid it, like he may have gotten carried away with his own gravity. The Road is good, too, but it could have been 20 pages shorter without losing anything. (If you want to say the same about No Country, I’m not going to stop you, but I had a former co-worker convincingly argue that the extra backstory at the end made it deeper than the movie.)

Lord of the Flies: Another former co-worker once said, “Piggy was an asshole. He got what he deserved.” Well, maybe he was an asshole. And maybe Ralph would have deserved it too, because his sin was the same: whiny, self-righteous weakness. Jack’s animalistic violence was just as wrong as all that. All the last 20 pages I was trying to figure out how he was going to resolve the situation without killing Ralph (in a purely nuts-and-bolts kind of way, nothing with any value or meaning could have happened after that). I don’t think Golding was really choosing sides, and I think that’s one of the marks of a great novelist. You can disturb people just by showing them true things.

Play It As It Lays: Another one I bought just before I left New York. I was terrified of it. I was terrified of being disappointed the same way I was disappointed trying to read The Naked and the Dead after falling in love with Armies of the Night: I got about 50 pages into it before I had to stop. Mailer was a kick-ass journalist, but his fiction was fucking unreadable, like he was building up facades in his fiction while he tore them down in his nonfiction. Or something. Thank god Didion doesn’t have that problem. She’s another one that doesn’t take sides, but she’s also pretty tactless, which makes for even more discomforting honesty. I’m going to the cafe now, I wish I could have a beer with her and ask her what she reads and whose art she likes. How old was she when she realized all the things that make her write like she does.

Next week I have an interview with none other than the Denver Public Library. I am having a heart attack. But the good kind. Wish me luck and a shitload of charm.