Astonishly good, tricky, literary book. This was like watching someone juggle while dancing a tango on the back of a moving horse. Incredible narrative tricks, plot inversions like a mobious strip, and some of the cleverest turns of phrase I've read in a LONG time made this an absolutely delicious, delightful, deceptively light serious book about fiction and publishing today.
Ian Minot, struggling writer and barrista, is working on his growing pile of rejection letters, even as his beautful and heavily accented Romanian girlfriend is ising fast on Manhattan's literary scene. A Confident Man enters the scene, and in a dazzling take-off of noir pulp, Ian is on his way into some of the most convoluted and literary troubles possible. Fakes, memoirs, fake memoirs, and fake people are the key characters and plot devices here, but if I had to pick one favorite trick of the book, it would be the use of some terms which, to a reader, felt like they were the only possible way to describe things or people.
Eg.
"Like the writers at any book party, the artists were easiest to find, self-consciously dressing down - ripped kowalskis and torn Levi's - or dressing up, in gatsbys and ascots, all ironic."
Can you not see them????
Franzens are styling eyeglasses, fitzgeralds are drinks, a golightly is the LBD the publicist girls wear (!), a humbert is a lonely perv... a scherherezade is a cliffhanger.
BRILLIANT.
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