The Keep

It was a promising set-up: there's two cousins, they played imaginative games together as kids. Then one, Danny, played a cruel prank on the other, Howard, and soon after they lost touch. Now they're adults. Howard has changed, become exceedingly rich, and has bought a castle somewhere near Prague. He invites Danny over for some nebulous help in Howard's renovation of the castle. What are his motives?

I got a hundred pages in and then... Nope. I'm not finishing this. First of all, Danny is too much of a weird loser to be interested in as the main character. What kind of supposedly straight 30-something guy wears brown lipstick, anyway? And then there's the shifting viewpoints with unexplained other characters. Got kinda meta, kinda fast. And, finally, the whole bit about having people conversing but not including quotation marks in the text... I find that style highly annoying. Not for me.

Stilted, disjointed and pretentious. It kept me wondering but more out of dumb curiosity than actual investment in the story or the various weakly drawn characters. Goon Squad is on my “to read” list, as is her latest, Manhattan Beach. Hoping for better things, much better things.

Book Club 2016 (2nd time reading)

Danny and Howard are cousins, friends during childhood, who have their friendship destroyed when Danny plays a cruel trick on Howard. Howard as a child is the geeky fat kid and Danny is the popular athletic one, but as the boys grow into men, the tables turn. Danny is surprised to hear from Howard who invites Danny to his new castle in Europe, a castle he is renovating into a hotel. The story shifts back and forth between the cousins and a prisoner in writing class struggling to write his first book. I was never sure what was real and what was not real, but the story was captivating and the characters were compelling.