Up a bit early because of the holiday weekend is my newest Dark Passages column, which has a bit of a serial theme going on:
The serial novel conjures up images of a bygone century, of a time when Charles Dickens made his name by teasing out the life and death of Little Nell in monthly installments. But one need only look to the flurry of posts on Jacket Copy last month discussing the first installment of Denis Johnson's serial noir novella "Nobody Move," published in Playboy, to sense renewed interest in this supposedly dead format. More intriguing, however, is how mystery and thriller stories figure prominently in serial fiction's current revival.
...Which brings us to "The Lemur" (Picador: 132 pp., $13 paper), the bound version of Benjamin Black's serial published in the New York Times Magazine over 13 weeks in late 2007 and early 2008. Black, of course, is the nom de noir of Booker Prize winner John Banville, and enough ink's been spilled about his pseudonymous transformation into a crime writer -- especially after "Christine Falls," Black's excellent and moody debut, was nominated for the Edgar Award. But what bears repeating is that the structural rigors of the genre allow Banville to worry less about maintaining a sometimes claustrophobic style, freeing up Black to play with language under the guise of entertainment.
Read on the for the rest.
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