Good god, I just read the
NYT review of
Calamity Physics. WTF? Either Pessl is giving sexual favors to the NYT review staff or I am insane.
From the review:
[ QUOTE ]
You could compare this road-tripping duo to Humbert Humbert and his Lo...
[/ QUOTE ]
Um, yes, you
could, because both are viatic narratives; but that's the ENTIRE analogy, so...basically, what is WRONG with you?
[ QUOTE ]
[Pessl's] prose...floats and runs as if by instinct, unpremeditated and unerring. A forgettable man is casually summarized as "an extra packet of salt one misses at the bottom of a bag of fast food"; teachers at Blue’s school have "the kind faces of mice"; lonely days "shuffled by like bland schoolgirls"; and a boy’s voice is "stiff as new shoes."
[/ QUOTE ]
"Instinctive" and "unerring"?? Pessl's stampeding metaphors are the WORST part of her prose, banal in their very garishness. Let's take a look at the subtlety of metaphor in a true master such as, I don't know?, NABOKOV:
"And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called 'sage brush' appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic." (
Lolita)
You
have actually read Nabokov in the last decade, right Ms. Schillinger? You sure you didn't just watch the movie? Wow.