Friday's Forgotten Book: Meeting Evil

I’m the only fan of Thomas Berger’s Meeting Evil (from 1992) that I know of. Everyone who has read the book on my recommendation has reported disliking it. I sympathize. The book is an uneasy marriage of the thriller, serial killer division (think Charlie Starkweather, not John Wayne Gacy) and classic farce (hero attempting to continue to play by the rules of polite society in the face of utter chaos). If you come for the thriller, the hero’s dilemmas will probably seem like unconscionable dithering; if you come for the farce, the villain’s mad cruelty may be too much to take. I remember loving every word of it.

Scenes From A Re-Education

Fourteen years ago, while reading The Adventures of Augie March in the break room of the bookstore where I worked, I was brought up short when Saul Bellow used a word I didn’t know – lepidopterous – to describe a chair.

What’s lepidopterous mean? I said.

A co-worker eating lunch looked up from the sports page and said: Butterfly-like.

Thanks, I said, and re-read the passage.

And thought:

Ah, I see it. What a brilliant image. What a wordsmith.

And then thought:

Wait a minute…

So…it’s a wing chair?

Bought | Read | Reading

Bought:

LaBrava, Elmore Leonard
Up In Honey’s Room, Elmore Leonard
Bandits, Elmore Leonard
No House Limit, Steve Fisher
Small Crimes, Dave Zeltserman
Baby Moll, John Farris


Read:

(Five Elmore Leonard novels)
Stick
LaBrava
Valdez Is Coming
52 Pickup
Riding The Rap

Reading:

Small Crimes, Dave Zeltserman

Friday's Forgotten Book: Quick Change

Newspaperman Jay Cronley wrote a handful of funny novels that were made it into fitfully-amusing movies. Quick Change is the best of the lot in a walk. A brilliant bank heist is followed by a spectacularly-botched getaway. Everyone’s nastier than in the Bill Murray film, and they all have ulterior motives the movie barely hints at, especially the cab driver. The plot begs comparison to Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder books, but I think of Cronley as more the poor man’s Charles Portis.