Tuesday, June 11, 2013

LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson and THE OUTLAW ALBUM by Daniel Woodrell


The literary barometers love Life After Life. Once again, I may be missing something. Here’s the conceit: What if you could keep coming back to life until you got it right? And so the protagonist dies over and over, and comes back again and again, until she does what you pretty much know she’s going to do from early on in the book. It’s very cleverly structured. A neat parlour trick. But the writing is pedestrian.

Daniel Woodrell is the freshest, darkest, most compelling voice I’ve read this year. He’s been around for a while, writing what he’s coined ‘country noir,’ but somehow I missed him until now. These stories, set in the Ozarks, knocked my socks off.

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