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A review by mainon
The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino
3.0
Two-thirds into the book, I hadn't really made up my mind about whether I liked it or not. The scaffolding along which the book unfolds is an intriguing little mystery: a former casino employee tips off a reporter friend about a secret casino heist. Secret because the stolen money was money already being skimmed off the top, so its theft couldn't be reported to the police. And according to the source, the guy who walked away with a cool half mil has popped back up in the area as a Native storyteller, of all things, with a thinly disguised name. Did the theft really happen? If so, is the thief really the same guy as this storyteller who tells Native fables to the kids at the local library?
I liked the mystery. The stakes weren't terribly high, perhaps, but I really wanted to know the answers to those questions.
To get those answers, though, I had to wade through a lot of what felt like literary filler. One of the storyteller's admirers--and one of the book's primary narrators--is a successful novelist who's made a mess of his life, and his ruminations are sometimes self-loathing and sometimes self-aggrandizing, but always self-centered. He hits on the reporter who's investigating the mystery, and there's a lot of unnecessary detail about their sexual relationship. In fact, her sexual escapades figure pretty heavily in the book, although they're somehow an odd mix of sordid and relatively uninteresting. It's telling that of the reporter, who is the only significant female character in the book, we know much more of her affairs and bedroom proclivities than we do of her reporting style. She seems to be motivated by two things: generically, by wanting to break a big story, and less generically, by wanting to perform fellatio on various men. It just didn't make for a very interesting character, let alone one I could invest in.
That said, the mystery really picked up in the last third of the book, and I came to wish that the author had discarded some of his literary pretentions and written a really solid crime thriller instead. It ended on a fairly high note, and my feeling by the end of the book was that it was a four-star read. Only in thinking back over the course of the experience and rereading some notes I'd taken along the way was I reminded of the parts I didn't particularly enjoy.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
I liked the mystery. The stakes weren't terribly high, perhaps, but I really wanted to know the answers to those questions.
To get those answers, though, I had to wade through a lot of what felt like literary filler. One of the storyteller's admirers--and one of the book's primary narrators--is a successful novelist who's made a mess of his life, and his ruminations are sometimes self-loathing and sometimes self-aggrandizing, but always self-centered. He hits on the reporter who's investigating the mystery, and there's a lot of unnecessary detail about their sexual relationship. In fact, her sexual escapades figure pretty heavily in the book, although they're somehow an odd mix of sordid and relatively uninteresting. It's telling that of the reporter, who is the only significant female character in the book, we know much more of her affairs and bedroom proclivities than we do of her reporting style. She seems to be motivated by two things: generically, by wanting to break a big story, and less generically, by wanting to perform fellatio on various men. It just didn't make for a very interesting character, let alone one I could invest in.
That said, the mystery really picked up in the last third of the book, and I came to wish that the author had discarded some of his literary pretentions and written a really solid crime thriller instead. It ended on a fairly high note, and my feeling by the end of the book was that it was a four-star read. Only in thinking back over the course of the experience and rereading some notes I'd taken along the way was I reminded of the parts I didn't particularly enjoy.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.