A sad thing happened this evening: I let Jim Crace go. I read Being Dead last year, and was disappointed, but because I kept hearing such good things about him, I decided last week to give him another chance. That second chance just ended with the completion of The Pesthouse–an even more (thoroughly?) disappointing read. Paragraph after paragraph of dull internal monologue just crying out to be skillfully summarized with a resonant gesture or symbolic set piece. It’s not like he can’t write. He just can’t move me.
I don’t like to make absolute statements about what I will and will not read, but it’s going to take something extraordinary for me to pick up another Crace book–seriously, how many books would be sufficient? Two seems somehow aggressive, but three and I’d feel like a fool. Besides, there are too many other promising authors I haven’t read.
Jim Crace: you’re fired.