Pinkerton's Sister

Peter Rushforth

Writing a novel where the prose-- it's lyrical qualities, its construction, etc.-- is the focus is an admirable goal. Far too few do it these days. But the best novels of this type-- Wendy Walker's books, Cormac McCarthy's, Kathe Koja's, Lucius Shepard's-- all have one thing in common-- while we're all marveling at the prose, the author never lets us forget that there's something going on beneath the surface, as well. The novels of those authors all have exceptionally strong plots to go with their gorgeous prose. That's what makes their books some of the best in the English language-- you can sink your teeth into them on many different levels.

Rushforth has created a nicely-written book here, but he forgot to add anything to it. Worse off, he's done it in seven hundred fifty-two pages. In books where this sort of thing works (James' The Aspern Papers comes to mind), their brevity is a controlling factor. Rushforth just kept going-- almost three hundred pages of Alice Pinkerton getting ready for church for forty-one chapters, and then a two-hundred-page, one-chapter depiction of the service itself. With, of course, long notes, digressions, and reminiscences from Alice's mind. It just keeps going, and going, and going, like the Energizer bunny.

I devoured the almost-six-hundred pages of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, lingered over the four hundred fifty of Walker's The Secret Service. They were great novels. When MacAdam and Cage's publicists trumpeted this doorstop, which may have gotten a bigger advertising budget than any novel MacAdam and Cage has ever released, as "the book everyone will be talking about in 2005," a small part of me expected something along those lines. To say I didn't get it would be quite the understatement. (And the blurb ended up being quite the overstatement; the novel has garnered a total of four reviews on Amazon, as I write this, in the years and a half since its release.) In fact, by the time I reached page three hundred of this bloated, overwrought, underperforming monstrosity, I was ready to use it for kindling; it's a good thing I finally abandoned it during one of the hottest weekends Cleveland has had in May in the past century. I ended up just taking it back to the library, so some other poor, unsuspecting fool might try to find something of use in its bloated pages. I couldn't.