Sometimes at the bookstore, you’ll open a novel, read a page or so, and decide, right then and there, that this narrator is not for you. Too erudite, too low-brow, too smarmy, whatever. You just can’t take that voice for five hundred pages. Or you find yourself absolutely mesmerized by a voice in the first paragraph and you have to have that novel. Ever had that happen? I have. Both ways.
