David wrote:
"i haven't read Bruen, but this sounds kind of like what i
was getting at when i said that certain authors sometimes
make good sense of nonsense. i am thinking of books like A
Wild Sheep's Chase by Murakami, for one, or anything by Steve
Erickson for another, though these books aren't strictly
noir."
Bruen isn't really comparable to these two. There is no sense
of the supernatural, as with Murakami, or the surreal, as
with Erickson (well, maybe a touch of the surreal, I could
certainly see one of these books featuring Breton's gun being
shot into a crowd). There are no sci-fi elements at all. The
Brant novels are definitely set in this world. It's just that
the characters are sometimes larger than life and the
situations are sometimes on the absurd side, but the
absurdity of real life -- there is little of the imposed
structure that Kevin recently described fiction as having.
Yes, the reader is told the solution of whatever the given
crime is in a partcular book (even if the cops might not
solve it, a killer being randomly killed before being caught,
or moving away, etc), but the crime is not the real appeal,
but the characters and the instituion in which they work. The
crime is just an excuse to set these characters into
action.
Like Chris, I'm usually with Kevin in wanting structured
fiction, that randomness is usually just a excuse for
sloppiness, but Bruen is one of the few that can make it
work. His Brant series is pretty near unique.
Mark
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