Anodyne
Friday, June 01, 2007
 
The New Yorker's Louis Menand casts a skeptical eye across Mr. Ondaatje's latest:

"The best parts of Divisadero are those which involve Coop and the gamblers. The language is colloquial and hardboiled—not Elmore Leonard, exactly, but refreshingly unperfumed. 'The Deadhead, or hippie, would be the one true ally Cooper found when he arrived at Tahoe. And the thing about "the hippie" was that he seemed the healthiest person in the casino.' Raymond Chandler could have written that. Chandler could not have written, 'We have been following the river, so that now we must look on the road as a stranger. The depth of water is about twelve inches, more when the spring storms come racing at low level over the fields and leap into the trees so nests capsize and there is the crack of old branches and then silence before each plummets in their fall. The forest, Rafael says, always so full of revival and farewell.' Maybe French peasants talk that way, but it sounds a lot like literature."
- posted by cjb @ 7:31 PM


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