52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
75. The raw shark texts.
A debut thriller that moved the NYT Magazine to declare it “genre-founding.” I got this on loan from a colleague at work who teaches meta-fiction. It is a pageturner — I couldn’t put it down. Its central conceit: that living concepts have evolved, akin to fish, and swim through the streams of communication, printed, spoken, sung. Some of them are predators, and their attacks explain all sorts of memory disorders. The main character is the territorial prey of a particularly deadly conceptual shark, and can’t remember who he is or what his life was like. The novel follows his efforts to tell himself / find out what happened and how to correct it.
My problem with the novel isn’t the conceit, which is excellent. It’s the application. Hall tries to elevate his fiction to the level of a worldview via a true-love-story, but fails to write characters who are either believable or believably true-lovable. The final three pages fall flat on their (two) faces, and they take the novel down a peg with them.
But if you’re in the mood for a thriller, a pageturner, and a good idea reasonably well fleshed out, here’s your book.
