(Getting to my e-mail infrequently;sorry for delay): I
suppose "treatment" is ambiguous: I meant the writer's
treatment of women characters, regardless of how they happen
to be treated by the men around them. Balzic's wife and, in
...Slow Tomatoes, the victim's wife live and breath and have
their own voices on the page. Though their lives are shaped
by males, they have their say...and it's often painful to
read.
It's a quality I like in Pelecanos also, though he does much
less with women characters. In his case, he decenters
character focus, passing the proactive roles around from
novel to novel, so that the reader can see an event from
several different perspectives. Crais is moving into that
level of writing, even while sticking to the series approach,
it seems to me. On Sat, 15 Jul 2000 10:54:39 -0700 (PDT) you
wrote:
>
> <<Won't argue with the comments on women,
except to say that I think
> Crais is reaching for character depth, and to my
mind has succeeded,
> at least in Sunset Express and LA Requiem. I'm
saying this in the context
> of rather low expectations of treatment of women in
hardboiled fiction--
> something we've discussed before. Among the authors
I'm most familiar with,
> Constantine sets the standard--just read The Man Who
Liked Slow Tomatoes, and
> was really turned around.>>
>
> You mean K.C.C. sets the standard for a good
treatment or that his novel is
> exemplary of a bad treatment? It isn't clear from
your last sentence.
>
> Regards,
>
> MrT
>
>
__________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Get Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from
anywhere!
> http://mail.yahoo.com/
> --
> # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
> # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
.
>
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Jul 2000 EDT