Review: Live by Night

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My reactions to this book are complicated.

Reading blurbs about Lehane's prose and narrative style, I can see why the reviewers say those things. Lyrical, sophisticated, noir, and all the other adjectives. Okay, maybe he's brilliant. Maybe. If so, I missed it somehow.

I'll give him this--he has a deft hand an creating complex, partially revealed characters with sparse prose and even sparser dialogue. That's hard to do, and he succeeds. He isn't shy about revealing how people can have contradictory character traits and find a way to live with that. And, ultimately, I get the impression that he finds people fascinating, and, on the whole, likes them--sins and all. Perhaps even because of their sins. I don't know.

But I end up not being happy I read the book, or met these characters. I don't feel enlarged by them intellectually or emotionally. In fact, I feel even dirtier having finished the book then I feel after I've spent half an hour on Facebook, even if during that half hour I read the comments, not just the OP. And that, my fellow readers, is not the way I ever want to feel after having spent time reading a book.

View all my reviews