Adam's review
Gob's Grief: A Novel
by Chris Adrian
Adam's review
Gob's Grief: A Novel by Chris Adrian
Adam's review
rating:
I'd read <b>The Children's Hospital<b> first. Just a suggestion.
Adrian's actual writing is always pretty good, but has moments of brilliance. He totally understands the threshold of - and how to lure the reader into - a stasis in pacing, and what a quick pull out of said state can do. Example: In <b>Gob's Grief<b> there is a section about how some power plant pollution killed the wildlife while making the sunset more vivid or something; not suicide-boring, but certainly not memorable until he ends a paragraph by jumping back from the current setting in relation to its previous forms, to the character in relation to the setting. I believe the character is Walt Whitman. Yes, that Walt Whitman. Anyway, he describes Walt as standing in a "fishless stream" under a "salmon sky". I can't find the section or I'd quote it exactly, but trust me: it's effective and beautiful.
Adrian's actual writing is always pretty good, but has moments of brilliance. He totally understands the threshold of - and how to lure the reader into - a stasis in pacing, and what a quick pull out of said state can do. Example: In <b>Gob's Grief<b> there is a section about how some power plant pollution killed the wildlife while making the sunset more vivid or something; not suicide-boring, but certainly not memorable until he ends a paragraph by jumping back from the current setting in relation to its previous forms, to the character in relation to the setting. I believe the character is Walt Whitman. Yes, that Walt Whitman. Anyway, he describes Walt as standing in a "fishless stream" under a "salmon sky". I can't find the section or I'd quote it exactly, but trust me: it's effective and beautiful.
