 |
| Adam Pellman is reading Samaritan by Richard Price |
While I enjoy whodunits and traditional detective stories, I often prefer "literary" crime fiction that is more character- and setting-driven, and that is focused less on revealing a criminal's identity than on revealing some deeper truth about the human condition. Richard Price is a crime writer whose work definitely falls into the latter category. I've read two of his other novels, Clockers and Lush Life, and both were excellent. Samaritan is about a former television writer, Ray Mitchell, who returns to urban New Jersey to teach a creative writing seminar at his old high school. After Ray is beaten nearly to death in his apartment, and refuses to cooperate with the police, a former childhood acquaintance of his, police detective Nerese Ammons, decides to work the case and find out what happened, and why.
As an avid reader, I was pleased to discover a passage early in this novel that perfectly illustrates one of the reasons I love to read:
"What we really get out of the good books we read is self-recognition. We read and discover stuff about life that we already knew, except that we didn't know we knew it until we read it in a particular book. And this self-recognition, this discovering ourselves in the writings of others can be very exciting, can make us feel a little less isolated inside our own thing and a little more connected to the larger world."
No comments:
Post a Comment