Maslin Watch: Smooth Opera Tour

Reed Arvin's The Last Goodbye offers Janet another opportunity for plot synopsis, liberal quoting, and utterly nonsensical phrases like "inveterate detective-noir fashion." By the way, I'm just noticing, this week it's "detective-noir," last week it was "neo-noir;" does the Times have some sort of policy about letting noir stand on its own, as it's perfectly capable of doing?

Never mind that the very first quote ("She was exquisitely beautiful, she was crying, and she could not be ignored") might indicate that this tale is not, as she puts it, "smoldering" but rather hackneyed. She does go on right away to tell us the book's "vastly better than its generic title," so maybe she'll make a case for Arvin despite the damning evidence of his own text, although the fact that she leads with either an obvious try for a cover blurb or a weak parody of an obvious try for a cover blurb doesn't help much:

Anyone with a taste for sultry, devious, adrenaline-boosting suspense stories may want to cancel a few appointments before opening this one.

(Of course, I could have posted that without any attribution and the adjective chain would have revealed Janet's hand...)

So, okay, plot synopsis, quick acknowledgment/dismissal of inevitable comparison of Southern legal thriller writer to Grisham, attempt to pass off Arvin's blatant weaknesses as a prose stylist with humor ("There may be times when you want to throw a bucket of water over this author"), and another weak stab at cover blurb glory:

This is not your father's James M. Cain-style sexual obsession anymore.

Now, this one I'm going to linger over because it shows up some of Janet's prime weaknesses as a prose stylist herself. One, ripping off the Oldsmobile tagline stopped being funny, oh, a couple years before they stopped slapping the Olds brand name on the cars. Two, if you're going to do it, do it right; the line didn't include "anymore," and adding it is not only redundant to the meaning of the sentence by destroys what little rhythm it has.

But now here's something I find rather interesting: the plot seems to hinge in some way upon a black opera diva connected to a murder victim...and yet Janet makes absolutely no reference to Diva. I can understand if she's not familiar with the Delacorta novel, but surely she must remember the 1982 film. And given how few thrillers revolve around interracial romances with mysterious black opera singers, I'd think it's worth maybe a namecheck, at the very least.

In all fairness to Maslin, she does make some (for her) extended remarks about the handling of race relations, pointing out that Pelecanos does this sort of thing better, and her criticism of Arvin's dreadful prose does get sharper towards the end--although it's somewhat risible for her to attack his "tone-deaf use of subordinate clauses" when she's just started off a sentence with "vigorous and jet-propelled as it is." On the other hand, despite how badly even she admits the novel is written, we see that what she really cares for is the mechanics of plot, as even Arvin's worst lines can't prevent "complete immersion into an exceptionally clever mystery." To her credit, though, she's probably right; Lord knows I've barrelled my way through any number of badly written thrillers, romance novels, and fantasies just to see what rabbit the author was going to pull out of his hat next. But can Arvin's narrative really be compelling enough to call The Last Goodbye "vastly better than its generic title?" Reader, you be the judge.