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I would give this ten stars if I could. The writing is masterful, with metaphors chosen not just for accuracy and not just for poetry but also because they chime a reference to some other imagery or idea elsewhere in the book. ::SPOILERS MAYBE?:: Two characters experience body dismorphism in mirrored ways--it's just a note, a hundred pages apart. And I love the description of Dylan feeling small, comparing it to when he was younger "the ailanthus branches brushing the back windows had seemed to me then like the spiraled arms of distant galaxies" and then in the present, in a prison, "After lights-out, a planeterium show of cigarette ends pulsed on the galleries above." I love his ability to string simile after simile (e.g., a brooklyn summer as "marimba notes in the yellow air") and not have it turn into a skippable descriptive imagery passage but instead make up the real heart of the writing, the story. I love the clever wordplay that doesn't draw attention to how clever the writer is: "I was winging it here. But that was okay. The facts would surely have to be bent to make a movie. This was what I'd come here to do: bend these facts into Hollywood's ear." To the people who say the second part isn't as good as the first or just that their differences were too jarring: you didn't understand the first part.

2022-11-14 16:09