T is for Tedious

A little over a week ago, M. and I drove to Ithaca. Being in Ithaca is wonderful, but getting there is another matter altogether. Before Melanie was fatally bitten by the knitting bug, the trip could be an intolerable bore. Now that she has something to keep her hands busy (mine are on the steering wheel), we had to find something to keep our minds occupied for the six hour drive. Commercial mass market radio is obviously insufficient, and NPR fades out past Worcester. Given six extra hours, both of us would choose to read, so we chose to have the CD player read to us.

M. surveyed the Boston Public Library's audiobooks section and found that it is predominantly populated by Bibles and Bible spinoffs, self-help, and mystery. We went for the last: Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. Twelve hours, ten CDs, plenty enough to get us there and back.

The best I can say for the book is that it was not the worst audiobook I've ever heard. (That would be Nobelist Jose Saramago's Blindness, which is pretentious crap, not even well written at the technical or stylistic level. It's shallow moralizing dressed up as sci-fi by a writer who has probably never read a sci-fi novel, let alone developed an appreciation of it. The best sci-fi takes technological and scientific speculation and lets it lead the way towards social criticism; the worst gets it the wrong way round.)

T is for Trespass was our introduction to PI Kinsey Milhone of Santa Teresa, CA, and for me, the acquaintance will remain brief. This particular yarn (identity thief posing as a nurse loots the elderly man, Kinsey's neighbor, for whom she's supposed to be providing home care) wasn't bad, but neither was it good. The story dragged on for ten CDs when it could have been told in six. If plot twists and clues couldn't be seen a mile away with the naked eye, the author put a telescope or ten in the reader's hands. There were lots of short, declarative sentences and a revolting action scene, so Grafton has certainly been reading the standard mystery how-to books, but the unfolding of the climax and denouement was sloppy and incredible. That being said, we did listen all the way to the end, so there must be something to the books. As I'm now three-quarters of the way through Susan Jacoby's indictment of American dumbness, I'm more inclined to credit my declining taste than some je ne sais quoi of Grafton's writing.