Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Just finished "Rules of Civility." It is "The Great Gatsby," complete with rules, parties, and even West Egg/East Egg for a scene or two. Toward the end, there's a last glimpse not of Daisy's dock and its green light, but of Gatsby/Tinker on a pier with a view of New York City and its lights. And the narrator, Nick, from Gatsby is, in this book, Katey . . . a woman whose dialogue is so masculine, so Sam Spade-ish, that I could not get past it. For the first half-dozen pages, I really thought the narrator was a man. When the narrator's spouse turned out to be the one who was male, I had to go back and re-read from the beginning. Didn't really clear anything up, but Katey certainly talks man talk. Like Sam Spade. And if Dashiell Hammett had tried to write "The Great Gatsby," it might have turned out something like this. But with a better plot. Here's some dialogue samples that kept me hearing Sam Spade and expecting to see Peter Lorre any moment: "Like most belligerent people, Hank was getting tiresome fast, so I had good reason to call it a night." Katey's comment about a friend, "She had changed into high heels and a tangerine-colored blouse that clashed with all her good intentions," could have been Sam describing a tiresome female client. When she says, "I found some unfinished wine and sampled it straight from the bottle. It tingled on the tongue like Sunday communion," I am seeing Sam Spade, not Katey Kontent. Likewise with "I found myself setting her straight," and "I gave those bastards who killed Clyde Barrow something to think about." And: "She was willing to be under anything, as long as it wasn't somebody's thumb." I suppose I hear Sam Spade because hardboiled fiction makes use of snappy similes to describe people and places. This book is larded with them, sometimes several per page, even several per paragraph. I started keeping a list of them after a while for laughs: -- denizens of the outer boroughs could clamber around like crabs in a pot -- it angled in the air like a spear that's hit its mark -- more flowers than at a funeral -- like an executive in Bendel's boardroom signing off on the spring collection -- as immobile as a statue -- like the front lines of the Easter uprising -- like the best-dressed newsroom in America -- the stock looked as fine as the leg of a Chippendale -- like the sound of someone biting on the blade of a knife -- white like a whaling church in new england -- boomed like a ship's cannon -- girls laughing like gulls -- she held it out to me like an Indian Chief -- doors so blue they could have been fashioned from planks of heaven -- the sky was Tiepolo blue -- the kitchen was as clean and white as heaven Best of all, in the space of just half a page, she describes herself both "like a wolf that's escaped its cage," and then "a little like a will-o'-the-wisp." Seriously?? Ah, and those are just a fraction of what's in store for the eager reader. Yep, Katey's a tough cookie climbing the social ladder -- she saw a colleague leave confidential papers on a subway train they were sharing after work, and wasn't going to do anything about it until a lowly chambermaid shamed her into it. This scene, like several others, has nothing to do with anything that comes later as far as I can tell. But there are some paragraphs where the syntax or the sense of it all is so tangled that I couldn't tell what was going on, so maybe I just missed something. Can someone explain what this means -- "Though both men could travel the normal distance from their accents to the neutral ear of the educated New Yorker, they were finding the distance between their respective homelands difficult to traverse." I have NO idea what is going on in that paragraph. But back to the tough cookie -- tough but somehow still soooo refined: a first-generation Brooklyn girl whose father was a Russian immigrant and whose uncle is your typical stevedore. Yet at 26, her eye and ear and whatever else are so very well trained. At a glance, in a moment, she can: -- recognize Greek Revival -- talk knowledgeably about "the machine for living" -- reference the Easter Uprising -- identify Cezanne as the topic of a fragmentary, overheard conversation -- compare various characters to Gertrude Stein, to Emma Goldman, to Carry Nation -- provide expertise on the science of the underside of butterfly wings -- assess the amateurishness of a natural history collection -- identify, at a glance, the Endurance in a hallway photograph, AND opine on Shackleton in the same thought -- meditate on the Greeks and their concept of Nemesis -- compare a restaurant to a country kitchen in the manner of Chardin -- recognize a quote from Virgil and comment that it was in perfect meter, iamb for iamb -- complete a quote from Macbeth started by another character -- recognize the Chippendale style AND Louis Quatorze AND fine Macassar AND authentic colonial -- AND reflect on LeCorbusier's musings on New York There is a mention or two in passing that she has a lot of books, but for a bookworm, she doesn't waste much time reading, not in this book anyway. But I assume the book references were stuck in there to explain how a poorly educated daughter of an immigrant could be so knowledgeable. Some reviewers have commented on the distracting nature of the dashes used instead of quotation marks. It is. As are the wacky names like Katey Kontent and Carrie Clapboard. Then there are those wierd nouns-as-verbs, like "we would cocktail at an empty bar," and "she would romance her way to the top of the Empire State Building," or "she Irished her cup." Characters come and go with too many coincidences, as New York Reviewer pointed out. In a better text, these might not stick out like such sore thumbs. "The Great Gatsby" is perfect and unforgettable, and inimitable. This book, not so much. I honestly think this is really a vanity novel. Good for him -- he is finally published. And got good reviews for a novel that lots of people like. I enjoyed it -- noticing the similes, the moments of expertise on arcane or not-so-arcane subjects. It was like a Weekly Reader story from my childhood, where you circle clues in the text. Supposed to hear him speak tonight. Probably will give it a pass. It's easy to be a critic and so hard to do the real writing, but 'm tired of the book and glad it's over.