association-list

A book with a very long sub­ti­tle, which kind of gives you a hint as to what’s coming. A lot of words are used to tell a story that really doesn’t need all, or even maybe most of them. Inter­est­ing work from a new writer, but ulti­mately cannot seal the deal because the built world here is too close to our own, and too seri­ous, to gen­er­ally end up taking a back seat to the emo­tional strug­gles of the car­toon­ish and deeply simple cen­tral char­ac­ter. You’re also spat­tered begin­ning to end with little tan­gent info­dumps that trade heav­ily in often second-​​hand relic Amer­i­cana. Over­all, it adds up to not very much that adds to the main nar­ra­tive. Amer­ica is sim­pli­fied and it’s the sim­pli­fied Amer­ica that’s val­orized and cas­ti­gated and rev­er­en­tially mocked, so too much of it seems to miss. It’s a book that seems to think too much of its movers and shak­ers and too little of the common people. It is also in love with its some­what abstracted voice despite the fact that the voice very often robs the events of book of any imme­di­acy they might oth­er­wise have. There is a lot of music in the book, but little of it works with the text, either being buried in the info­dumps where you’re already bored and want to go back to the story now or they’re just tacked on, like the author just real­ized that he hasn’t men­tioned any­thing musi­cal in two pages.

It’s almost a tic. Frustrating.

There are a lot of good parts here. I think that Slat­tery could pro­duce some really inter­est­ing mate­r­ial if he man­ages to get all of the ele­ments march­ing in line.