*"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
See, that's a fantastic line. I'd go big out an old copy but I suspect it's mouldering in the garage and for some reason (looks like the publisher is re-releasing them) it's not available on Kindle until sometime in 2016. Shame I would have ordered it from my sickbed.
Not having had enough punishment with the worthy but painful
A Brief History of Seven Killings, I have been reading Jonathan Franzen's
The Corrections (for some unspecified reason, Amazon gave me a free book and I thought this might make me cleverer and earn me yet more of the good and clever YACF respec'). I've thrown in the towel. You may go back to regarding me with disdain, the group's itinerant village idiot. Hide behind the sofa and pretend that like you're not there when I post. I don't mind. It's reminded me why I dislike literary fiction. If you've not had the misfortune to read it, it's basically five grievously entitled people whining and being annoying for 600-odd pages. Lots of reviews seem to think this is a stunning portrayal of a family breakdown and one that they so recognise. I'd hate to meet their families. If I did I think I'd tell them SHUT UP too. I wouldn't mind so much if it was a struggle against adversity, but all the adversity is of their own making. They're choking on their own indulgence. I don't want to hear them coughing up their rich, sludgy lives over one another.
I'll admit he's a clever writer. Some of it sparkles. But one simile follows another. And another. And another. So where Gibson paints a picture in a single, brief line that sets the tone for an entire three book series, you need to dig through four pages of Franzen's blizzard of description to get within viewing distance of whatever the hell he was trying to say, which turns out not to be much at all. And then he'll go off on tangent that appears to have little to do about anything, seemingly to prove that he's done lots of research.
I got to 67%. Basically there could have been an acerbic 200 page book somewhere in there but it's smothered under 400 pages of insufferably smug cleverness. And a couple of the grimmest most cringeworthy sex scenes ever.