Book Notices | The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker / The Intern's Handbook by Shane Kuhn

Joel Dicker, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair

Amazon   Joel Dicker's much ballyhooed The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair is a very long book. Reading it, one has a lot of time to think about whether jumping into a 650-odd page tome was a good idea. I'm still not sure. There was a lot I didn't like about it. A litany of complaints: I'm pretty sure a lot of the book could have been lopped off to good effect. I found much of the story implausible. The too-precious chapter openings--in which Harry gives Marcus advice about writing--are often nauseating. Marcus' mother--a minor character, thank you, Jesus--is a ludicrous caricature of a Jewish mother. Everyone was supposed to love the fifteen-year-old Nola--whose disappearance in 1975 is the book's great mystery--but the persona she presented to people, as described in the book, was not particularly likable in my opinion. And the book within a book, Harry Quebert's alleged masterpiece, well, it reads like schlock in the snippets that punctuate this book. Towards the end, my interest in the story increased as we finally found out whodunit. And there is indeed a decent mystery buried in these pages. But there are so many twists and turns in the last couple chapters that I wound up not really caring by the end of it what had really happened to Nola.

Shane Kuhn, The Intern's Handbook

Amazon   Well this was a fun read. Shane Kuhn's The Intern's Handbook purports to be a text written by an unusually successful assassin for the benefit of new recruits at his organization. At 25, he's about to retire from the biz. He's been working since he was a kid for a company that inserts assassins, posing as interns, into business settings to get access to high-profile targets. Anyway, there's a lot of assassin-y advice, and we hear about the principal's tortured past, and the story winds up having unexpected twists that work pretty well. Our narrator's tone and jokes and movie references get a little tiresome, but it's not unbearable. Not the height of literature, perhaps, but reasonably enjoyable.