Finished Honeymooners today. As I may have guessed, it continued to devolve and crash and burn, and then it was done. One of my favorite parts was when Alice Ann poured ketchup all over her virginal white “second honeymoon” dress.
I can’t really decide if I liked it. I imagine it would have been really good, but while I was plodding down the back stretch I kept getting the feeling that the writing was a little stale. This is the novel it took Kinder upwards of twenty years to write, and I think it shows. The kind of life he writes about in this book, and sometimes he does it very well, is fast-paced but directionless, just like the novel itself. It somehow seems incongruous that a writer should slave away at that kind of book for so long. I know it’s a bit hackneyed, but this kind of writing fades real quick, like a posed smile.
Speaking of hackneyed, I thought the ketchup v. wedding dress scene was a little much, and maybe so was the conversation about the Old Goat in the moon. But this type of thing is easy to pick out from such a novel and poke at, and I don’t think it’s that interesting.
In other news, I wrote a piece of flash fiction yesterday to submit to Weave Magazine. Today I napped.
