A Thriller That Has It All
In the midst of slogging through an ARC of a touted fall “literary” title, I was struck by this comment in a NYT BR review,
To shape the everyday happenings of the world into a good story — isn’t that what novelists are supposed to do best? Yet readers must often choose between “literary fiction,” understood to be works of well-written but meandering prose about the “real world” of human relationships, and “commercial fiction,” fast-paced novels in which plot is everything.
Reviewer Danielle Trussoni (who worked to achieve the elusive blending of literary and commercial her debut novel, Angelology, which appeared on the NYT fiction best seller list for six weeks and two more on the extended list) finds in Ted Mooney’s “nuanced literary thriller, The Same River Twice, that it’s possible to find a novel that ‘has it all’.”
Unfortunately, at the end of the review, she spends several paragraphs describing problems with some of the details which she finds “off”, but says that she is still “mesmerized by the storytellers gift.”
The Boston Globe has no such quibbles and flat out loves this “…philosophical entertainment doubling as a riveting, unconventional thriller. Largely set in a pre-European Union Paris and rendered with such painterly depth that the luminous city nearly becomes a character…”
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