“Fuck, Hop, can the purple prose.”
And as things move along, so does Abbott’s diction, keeping time with the downward spiral her characters get trapped in.
January 02, 2011, 6:30pm Comments
abbott continued
megan abbott, the song is you
“This wasn’t all true, but it was true enough. Maybe. Hop couldn’t untangle his motives. There was something about covering his own tracks — tracks he thought he’d long ago covered. And sure, there was something else.”
Abbott puts her protagonist in a nice situation here: simultaneously covering up a bad thing that’s happened (or, rather, protecting the cover-up he’s already done) while trying to find out what actually led to said bad thing that happened. It’s a neat double-bind. And the language she uses is nice, too, and fitting for that protagonist as a Hollywood flack; it’s a lighter, flashier version of Mickey Spillane hard-boiled, all sparkle and no weight behind it.
December 31, 2010, 10:43am Comments
