David Gordon. The Serialist. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2010. 335 pages.
Fiction is much harder to review than non-fiction. With the latter, you just need a good topic and a passable writing style, and you can get a feel for the book within a few pages. Fiction, which requires a much bigger investment from the reader, it a different animal. A novel can go from great to awful in less than a page. Maybe this is why I review so much more non-fiction than fiction: it’s easier, and it’s much more straightforward. But I decided to take a chance on The Serialist.
The Serialist starts strong–in the first 20 pages, I thought this was the best novel I’d read for a while. It’s a great set-up–Harry Bloch, a struggling writer who toils in the trenches of genre fiction while his ex-girlfriend runs with a higher-class literary crowd. Gordon really nails the struggling genre-writer thing, and he creates a character who’s painfully aware of his own short-comings.
Then the plot kicks in, with Bloch being commissioned by a serial killer on death row to do some freelance work. From there, the writer’s pulled into the story, and must play detective for high stakes in a deadly game of cat and mouse (yes, I know I’m mixing metaphors…I’m paying homage to the genre). To me, once you’ve got bodies turning up, the story gets much less engaging. Serial killers are just about all the same: they’re narcissistic sadists. Struggling writers, though, come in all different shades of desperation and failure. There’s just more room for real novelty (and literary experimentation) there. I know there are probably way too many writers writing about writing, but to me it’s more fun to read that than a writer writing about serial killers. If you like grisly, though, you’ll get your fill.
It’s still a good slice of crime genre fiction, and it’s an interesting twist on the concept of a writer (or editor) getting entangled in his story, much like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, but tending towards the pulps rather than the esoterics. Could have done without the Al Gore reference in one of the stories, though–if it’s earnest, oh please, and if it’s ironic, that was maybe too subtle. In any event, it took me out of the story and got me thinking about the politics of climatology, which probably wasn’t the author’s intention.
At the end, it was an entertaining book, and decent crime fiction. By half-way through, I wasn’t as entranced as I was in those first 20 pages, but it still delivered something good.
