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All the time I was reading Frederick Busch's The Night Inspector (1999) I was surprised I was continuing to do so; eventually I came to the conclusion that I was persisting in some sort of subconscious homage to Busch's immediately preceding novel Girls (1997), which I read a few years ago and adored. The earlier book achieves the singular feat of taking something that's much like the serial-killer-chiller novel and turning it into what I would regard as (however much I detest the inherent snottiness of both term and judgement) literature; I started reading it expecting it to be just another throwaway thriller and discovered it bore an emotional burden that was all at the same time subtle, profound and true.
It was obvious from the cover blurb that The Night Inspector wasn't going to be more of the same; even so, I was expecting it to have the same strengths as Girls -- one of which was a compelling narrative drive. Accordingly, I've been hoarding the The Night Inspector ever since I bought it, three or four years back, saving it up for myself as a special treat.
Perhaps the very fever heat of my anticipation contributed more than anything else to my disappointment.
Anyway . . .
Billy Bartholomew was a sniper/assassin on the Unionist side during the Civil War. In the closing days of the conflict some of his intended prey shot back; even though the medics managed to keep him alive, his face was so hideously mutilated that nowadays -- as a semi-scrupulous wheeler-dealer in NYC -- he always, in public, wears an elaborate mask. One of the friends he makes in hope of seeing a profit is Herman Melville, who has fallen from literary favour and is now working as a customs inspector on the New York docks. Billy's life is one where past and present frequently collide, his wartime experiences -- and even those of his youth -- often making themselves a part of the stream of consciousness that is his experience of the world. In everything he seeks profit -- in everything except his relationship with the Creole whore Jessie.
The book has many merits: the picture it paints of the nightmare that was poverty in New York City in the latter part of the 1860s is, to judge by my slender reading on the subject, pretty accurate; Billy's reminiscences of wartime activities are woven tidily into the main narrative and are nicely told; and the book's near-finale, as Billy and his companions, Melville included, in effect find themselves venturing further and further into the circles of Hell, has a real power and a real grimness.
But I suspect many people won't get that far. The first three-quarters or more of the book is near-fatally wounded by an astonishing turgidity of language, a wallowing in determined Fine Writing that may perhaps be intended as imitation of Melville (it's so long since I've read him that I can't recall) but comes across as pretentious self-indulgence; it helps the book not at all that, quite often, the Fine Writing actually is pretty damn' good. Sacrificed at this altar are such qualities as the convincing portrayal of character (for example, we're regularly told by Billy of his profit-grasping nature but we see so little evidence of it that it's hard to believe it's a part of him) and, even more grievous, the essence of storytelling: there are events, sort of, but they're happening on the far side of a muffling bolster of verbiage rather than in any potentially affecting proximity to us. What a shame, what a shame, what a shame.
I now, of course, don't know what I'll do the next time I'm confronted by a Busch novel. Should I grab it, hoping it'll be as good as Girls? Or should I be wary . . .?
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I'm also wondering what I should do about my counting system. Now that Bogus Science is finally in the process of being signed up, I'm going to be reading a heck of a lot of books for purposes of research -- and often enough at my desk rather than in bed or in the lav or wherever . . . although much of the time I'll be reading them there as well. Should I note these as 'books read" or should I simply regard them as, so to speak, work documents? I dunno.
