Some novels, like the Dude's rug in "The Big Lebowski" really manage to tie everything together. This novel, IMHO, does not.
Minor literary masterpiece, or indulgent, manipulative mess? The first third of the book is shamelessly manipulative, as Sheers "creates" tension -- in an otherwise mind-numbingly boring flashback account of the lives & doomed love of two young people -- by embedding a few paragraphs at the end of each chapter in which the now-widowed survivor of that young couple, Michael, lets himself into his neighbors' house and creepily pokes around a bit.
OK, something strange is going on. The back door is wide open, but no one appears to be home -- that's his rationale for the poking around. Has something awful happened in his neighbors' house? Is he going to do something awful? Well, you'll have to read it to find out ...
But to be fair to Sheers, it kind of works. Kind of. The Shocking Thing, when it finally comes, is very shocking, and no punches are pulled. We learn other shocking things that puts Michael's odd behavior into some context. There is a neat twist in which (and I am REALLY trying to avoid spoilers here) the line between guilt and innocence is revealed to be a very fine and fuzzy line indeed.
BUT ... no, I didn't "love" this book. Unlike some other literary novels that have adapted the "vocabulary" of genre fiction to their own ends (I'm thinking, for example, of Jon McGregor's "Reservoir 13", or Michel Faber's "The Book of Strange New Things"), I didn't feel that Sheers had taken the tropes of genre and used them to enhance our understanding of difficult, complicated situations. Allowing the reader to come away feeling that both the genre and the literary had been improved by the mix. Sheers commitment to writing a thriller felt superficial and technical at best ( ... let's see how long I can get away with withholding crucial information, like what the heck is happening here ...), and he'd completely abandoned it by the end.
I didn't close this book with a sigh, feeling that the frustrations and (deliberate) mis-directions that the authors had put us through had been well worth it in the end -- that they had "really tied the room together".
Minor literary masterpiece, or indulgent, manipulative mess? The first third of the book is shamelessly manipulative, as Sheers "creates" tension -- in an otherwise mind-numbingly boring flashback account of the lives & doomed love of two young people -- by embedding a few paragraphs at the end of each chapter in which the now-widowed survivor of that young couple, Michael, lets himself into his neighbors' house and creepily pokes around a bit.
OK, something strange is going on. The back door is wide open, but no one appears to be home -- that's his rationale for the poking around. Has something awful happened in his neighbors' house? Is he going to do something awful? Well, you'll have to read it to find out ...
But to be fair to Sheers, it kind of works. Kind of. The Shocking Thing, when it finally comes, is very shocking, and no punches are pulled. We learn other shocking things that puts Michael's odd behavior into some context. There is a neat twist in which (and I am REALLY trying to avoid spoilers here) the line between guilt and innocence is revealed to be a very fine and fuzzy line indeed.
BUT ... no, I didn't "love" this book. Unlike some other literary novels that have adapted the "vocabulary" of genre fiction to their own ends (I'm thinking, for example, of Jon McGregor's "Reservoir 13", or Michel Faber's "The Book of Strange New Things"), I didn't feel that Sheers had taken the tropes of genre and used them to enhance our understanding of difficult, complicated situations. Allowing the reader to come away feeling that both the genre and the literary had been improved by the mix. Sheers commitment to writing a thriller felt superficial and technical at best ( ... let's see how long I can get away with withholding crucial information, like what the heck is happening here ...), and he'd completely abandoned it by the end.
I didn't close this book with a sigh, feeling that the frustrations and (deliberate) mis-directions that the authors had put us through had been well worth it in the end -- that they had "really tied the room together".
