Just finished the latest Elmore Leonard. Have mixed feelings.
On one hand I feel his style is opening up, evolving,
becoming even more fluid and balanced between his narrator's
voice and the voices of his characters. On the other hand
nothing really happens, which is always sort of the joke with
Leonard, especially his later stuff, but with Up In Honey's
Room, really not much is going on. So if the plot is so light
then is there something else at work here? A time and a place
- Detroit at the end of WW2? Some kind of social or
philosophical or aesthetic pondering. Not really. Is this
what you do when you get old, you dive back into some memory
cave and doodle on the walls? Still, I'll take him over the
cheap posturing of a lot of other crime writers I read this
year. He still deals the real.
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