Three humorous books this time around, each disappointing in its own way, as well as a solid psychological suspense novel.
Donald Westlake is usually considered the master of the comic caper, but I found What's so Funny? to be below par. I generally enjoy the Dortmunder novels, and this one had some solid parts. Dortmunder is brought into a scheme to steal a very valuable chess set of doubtful provenance, much against his will. Westlake faces right up to the task of making a loser criminal into someone that we care about, and I think it's a tricky act. For one thing, Dortmunder is usually being pushed into his schemes by someone worse than he is, and so he has that sad sack, put-upon aspect that makes us like some kinds of clowns.
Westlake's sense of comedy is impeccable in a number of the scenes. There's a great bit of farce when the 5 gang members are trying to hide in a two-room office as a detective checks around. Westlake manages it very deftly, even though it would almost seem like the various peregrinations would need a diagram.
But I think that where Westlake really misses the boat in this novel is in the wrap-up. In his better novels, the thing that undoes his protagonists' schemes seems to come out of nowhere, even as he sets it up way in advance, and it seems inevitable in retrospect. Here, though, we know exactly how everything will unravel by 1/3 of the way through, and that's a pity. There's also a sort of perfunctoriness to his denouements for the minor characters. Johnny Eppick and Fional Helmslow just sort of fade out, with neither getting any sort of resolution.
In A Confederacy of Dunces, P J O'Toole takes a different approach to a loser protagonist. Ignatius Reilly is absolutely unappealing, a self-centered, ungrateful elitist who insults everyone he meets. I had very mixed reactions to this book. There are some very funny bits, when Reilly starts a riot in a pants factory, for example, but the tone never really gelled for me. It feels like O'Toole occasionally wants to write a satire of the type where a naif is thrust into the modern world and confused by, say, race relations. (Sort of like Being There). But Reilly is such a jerk that he gets in the way of these segments. At other times, the book feels like it's a farce -- look at these silly people doing silly things. But it's just too long for that -- there are long stretches where nothing particularly funny happens.
What it really comes down to for me, though, is that O'Toole didn't give us anyone to care about. You can pull that off in a shorter novel, but in a book this long, it turns it into a real slog.
I've just begun Wodehouse's Adventures of Sally, and I'll probably finish it because I'm a completist, but it's an obviously early work. There are some sparkling lines that could sit with the best of his later work, but they're pretty infrequent, unlike his later work in which funny lines seem to unfurl effortless one after another.
On a totally different note, Andrew Taylor's The Four Last Things was an excellent psychological suspense thriller, very different from Waiting for the End of the World. At the beginning of the book 4-year-old Lucy Appleyard is kidnapped, and the story follows the twin paths of the kidnappers and Lucy's mother (a Church of England deacon). Lucy's mother goes through a crisis of faith which is touchingly described. Taylor paints a great picture of a person facing the problem of theodicy for the first time in a real rather than theoretical way. The novel ends with a neat trick, making us want to read the next book in the trilogy, even though it takes place more than a decade earlier -- the opposite of the usual "what comes next?"
There's a police procedural in there as well, but it's barely touched on, and I think Taylor made the right choice to keep it in the background. The psychological drama stays in the foreground, and, in the end, the police don't do much except act as a motivating force for some of the actions that the Appleyards and the kidnappers take.
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