Hot Pink by Adam Levin
My rating: 4/5 cats
rating:
i didn’t hem and haw over my star cat rating the way mfso did. this is an easy four stars cats. i loved reading it, but—nature of the beast—not every story was perfection. i lost no sleep over my rating.
review:
do you want the good news or the bad news?
the good news is, adam levin does not need 2000 pages to make his points.
the bad news is, in some of these stories, i feel like he was unconsciously punishing himself, foot-binding himself into smaller containers so that he didn’t spill over into instructions scope. dear adam, didn’t you mean to write about 400 additional pages to jane tell?? i feel like it must have just slipped your mind and maybe you can just pick up where you left off thanks.
again, mfso’s review does a great job breaking the stories down into their salient points, while greg’s does a great job stressing out over goodreads in general. distribute your votes accordingly, please.
but i have a few things of my own to say.
1) if mfso doesn’t think frankenwittgenstein is totally a dfw story, he is either being disingenuous or deluded. because it totally is. and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that: anxiety of influence, schmanxiety of schminfluence. it is a good story in its own right, but there is no denying the tone, the perspective, the concerns, the turn are all delightfully reminiscent.
2) unreliable narrators. you think you know unreliable narrators because you’ve read some patrick mcgrath? you ain’t seen nothing yet. what’s great about the unreliable narrator in short story form is when the reader’s penny drops. some of them are outed on the first or second page. some not until the closing lines. some are never outed, and it gives you that prickly, unfinished feeling, like you think “maybe that one was an U.R., too, but i just didn’t get enough time to spend with them…” because in general, in life, everyone is unreliable in the end.
3) the thing that makes me think that maybe he was training himself to “write smaller” is the sheer unpredictability of these stories. they are like crazyballs—the trajectory seems to frequently boiiiiing to the unexpected. this is a complimentary observation, by the way. it is jarring because the stories are just these little short stories, and a turn like some of the ones here would feel more natural in a longer work, but here, compressed as they are, when you think they are headed in one direction and then suddenly—gotcha! now we are talking about this and the characters are doing this—keep up, fatso!
it is pretty cool, i think.
definitely worth reading, definitely not giving greg his copy back, and definitely want to see these other colors when they come in. a gray book called hot pink seems unfair.
but what would sarah montambo think?
read my book reviews on goodreads
