![]() ![]() Cline has come closer to finding an ideal novel form that recognizes neither past nor future but passes as Alex tries to live, \'in some alternate universe ruled by immediacy.\'\ The difficulty in depicting a cohesive larger picture plagued The Girls, as well, though the problem is less marked here, as Ms. But as the story becomes more plotted and Alex’s deceptions come to a head, The Guest runs out of steam, finishing with an anticlimactic non-ending. ![]() The descriptions are frequently bracing and acute, sharpened to icepicks by a stance of amoral neutrality. Cline’s writing thrives in the pure present. Apart from Alex’s trouble with her ex, we know nothing of her background. Cline generates an impressive amount of intrigue by the simple method of cutting backstory out entirely. Positive The Wall Street Journal \"A staple of contemporary fiction is what is called, in writing-workshop terms, backstory, meaning an aspect of a character’s past that is revealed to explain her behavior, much in the way that psychoanalysts seek an understanding of their patients by excavating buried traumas. In this balance of meaning and meaninglessness there has always been enough mystery to keep Frank occupied for a lifetime. ![]() They are also works of tremendous craft and arrangement, full of tantalizing patterns and recurrences. The Bascombe books are unquestionably faithful to randomness, to the great human accident of existence. But these weaknesses, however exasperating, are vital because they help to make Frank a convincing and three-dimensional everyman. The immediacy of the narration not only communicates Frank’s moment-to-moment bewilderment, it leaves him unvarnished and exposed, deprived of the luxury of sanitizing impressions that might make him look bad. Ford has written these books in the first-person present tense. Ford’s hands, clichés become koans, simultaneously resonant and hollow depending on one’s fortunes at the time, and to Frank they double as sound, practical counsel and bitter jokes. Ford’s tendency to write in chin-stroking proverbs has brought him critics.but what’s important is less the truth of these utterances than the extent to which Frank relies on them. ![]()
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