Maslin Watch: Bulking Up

I think I'll be making a habit of Maslin Watching at the end of the week from here on in, catching both reviews in one swoop. (Like you care.) Yesterday she let loose with another twofer, covering new thrillers from Harlan Coben and Jonathan Kellerman, two authors she says "start with a routine situation and see how far it can stretch." But Coben's Just One Look is deemed "far-fetched even for a thriller," and given the narrative excesses Maslin's tolerated in the past, one can only imagine what Coben must have done this time--though she still admits "he does a good job of riveting the reader."

It's a whip-through critique, over too quickly to be especially outstanding or awful, though it does play to Maslin's strengths as a thriller reader. She deals with Kellerman's Therapy with equal dispatch, pausing at the onset to mark "the descriptive detail that is one of his hallmarks and one of the incidental attractions in his fiction." A hallmark and incidental? Never mind...anyway, she quotes from this one a bit more extensively, and one really must wonder, given the near-parodic dreadfulness of the prose, if she isn't cannily trying to supply the novel with enough rope: "The killer used the spear on her, then he shot her, too. To me that says big-time anger."

Earlier in the week, Maslin took on Transmission, the "wickedly astute second novel" by Hari Kunzru. This review's much heavier on the quotation, with a minor emphasis on synopsis, with just a smidgen of criticism, and that primarily through comparison:

If Transmission starts out with an eye for literate social satire that suggests Martin Amis or Zadie Smith, it winds up in a Chuck Palahniuk paranoid daydream of systematic unraveling.

In other words, it reads like one of the reviews where she's coasting, relying on tricks instead of working up the close readings that come when she tackles thrillers and suspense novels head on.