This past weekend, I listened to Austen's Northanger Abbey and read Penelope Evans' Fatal Reunion.
Northanger Abbey was the one Austen book I've never read (although I've never actually finished Mansfield Park), and I rather enjoyed it. There wouldn't be much more to say about it than that, except that I see these puzzling mentions here & there that it's one of best works. I can only think that critics write such things in order to be contrarian -- Northanger is nowhere near the level of interest of Emma or Pride and Prejudice. The heroine, Catherine, doesn't have the kind of interplay with her love interest that Emma or Lizzie have. Even worse, Austen throws in little essays in defense of novels, which, as funny as they are, bring the whole story to a halt. One can't help thinking that the mature Austen would never have done such a thing.
Evans' previous novels have been about people in strange psychological states. Freezing, for example, was about an autistic (schizophrenic?) photographer. Fatal Reunion starts with a fairly normal guy, and then builds up the stress on him. We see him slowly becoming more paranoid and less able to function. I wasn't thrilled with the end of the story, in which everything seems to snap back to normal. But I was puzzled by the end of the book, which implies that the whole novel was a writing exercise by the main character.
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