barbara fister reviewed The long-legged fly by James Sallis
Review of 'The long-legged fly' on 'LibraryThing'
4 stars
Moody, improvisatory, and poetic, this first book in the Lew Griffin series is a set of short stories loosely joined, and over the course of it we get to know something about the narrator, a writer, loan collector, lost soul, and finder of lost women. The language is lovely. The stories are vignettes. Characters flare on the page so we can glimpse something of them and of Lew, and then go out. The short first chapter seems to be leaves gathered up from someone else's stories, perhaps one of the crime novels Lew writes. The overall effect is rather like Lew's take on the way we make up our lives: "by bits and pieces, a piece of a book here, a song title or lyric there, scraps of people we've known, clips from movies, imagining ourselves and living into that image, then going on to another and yet another, improvising …
Moody, improvisatory, and poetic, this first book in the Lew Griffin series is a set of short stories loosely joined, and over the course of it we get to know something about the narrator, a writer, loan collector, lost soul, and finder of lost women. The language is lovely. The stories are vignettes. Characters flare on the page so we can glimpse something of them and of Lew, and then go out. The short first chapter seems to be leaves gathered up from someone else's stories, perhaps one of the crime novels Lew writes. The overall effect is rather like Lew's take on the way we make up our lives: "by bits and pieces, a piece of a book here, a song title or lyric there, scraps of people we've known, clips from movies, imagining ourselves and living into that image, then going on to another and yet another, improvising our way from day to day through the years we call a life." The final line (as an alert 4MA reader pointed out) is a quote from Beckett's Malone. It's fairly typical of the book that literary references have taken residence in the story, but if you don't know them they seem to just be a natural part of Lew's life - as if Beckett was writing about him. It skirts pretentiousness, but the richness of the voice avoids it.