I'm surprised to be the first to rate and review this book. I thought Smith was a bigger name than that by now. He's put out a bunch of books, and I've read most of them. Some were four stars, a few were three stars. This is the first two-star, disappointingly enough.
Why the low rating? Well, the book just didn't work for me. It has a lot of the familiar elements: Smith's inimitable style, economy of language, and the Southern Noir vibes which usually just means a lot of poverty, trailers, and "ain't" s. But ... nothing about it really worked for me.
I've tried to nail down precisely why, and here's what I've come up with:
1. It has the wrong density - the prose looped and looped on itself in repetitions, overlong barely punctuated sentences rolling into overlong ooverstylized paragraphs. Smith is an author who can do wonderful things with words, but here he seems to have focused on that over other things, like plot.
2, I didn't really care about any of the characters. Maybe I've had enough Southern Nir. Maybe Smith spends too long playing around with prose instead of developing them. They always feel miles away, buried under narrative stylings.
3. Wasn't much of a plot, really. And it's difficult to gauge what the novel was trying to say.
There's one chapter in the novel, chapter 16, that's clear and clean and as good as anything the author has ever written. The rest is oh so muddled.
The good thing is that the novel's relatively short. But frustratingly, it wasn't worth the time. I'm sure it'll work differently for different readers, as these things always do. Thanks Netgalley.