Customer Reviews

Occasional Hell

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The Publishers Weekly review quoted by amazon has it about right -- An Occasional Hell is occasionally hellaciously good but overall a mixed bag. It gets four stars rather than three only because the parts that are good are SO good.

There are frequent moments of brilliant prose and observation, with lapidary precision and beauty -- and then in the next page the writing becomes over-reaching and self-indulgent. Some of the good parts:
"... he had lived a long time without the madness of sex -- not without sex itself but the wonderful terrible insane burn of desire..."
"[speaking of faculty wives] that typical hostess mentality he had grown to abhor, that shallow self-centeredness of women whose days are comprised of lunch, tennis and cocktails..."
"... a middle-aged man is hope betrayed. ... Dawn arrives too quickly, before strategy can become execution."

But then we have the too cutely self-referential:
"He was writing a story now even as he stood there, writing a story about himself thinking about himself, a story empty of epiphanies about a man staring at the juncture of sweet grass and dirty sidewalk...." Which in a way summarizes Silvis, the author, as much as DeWalt, the protagonist.

Plotwise, the first half or so builds unbearable whodunnit tension, as the facts of the case become less and less explicable and we wait some revelation to make sense of it all. But then, though there is a resolution of sorts, DeWalt does not seem to come to it by genuine evidence or Sherlockian reasoning but more the "it COULD be like this, therefore it IS" syllogism. And in the end, we are left with a cop-out, a vaguely indeterminate ending. Silvis's own prose expresses it well: "[H]e had tossed too many glass balls into the air, had started too many plates spinning. And now what was he to do..."

So ... get this one for the half which is brilliantly written, and skim over the parts less so. It's still a rewarding read. Silvis is very likely better at short fiction, and I plan to check his collections out.