PENN BOOK REPORT: Dead Girl Blues by Lawrence Block

Another entry from Penn private email list:

Dead Girl Blues by Lawrence Block – 201024 – Brian Koppelman insisted I read this book. The first couple chapters are very intense and disturbing, and the book is on very heavy subjects and thoughts but written very breezy. It’s a skilled pro writing and I like that the narrator is so likeable (that’s part of the idea), and that he takes nice asides and it’s funny and sweet and so easy to read and on a very heavy set of subjects. I don’t want to blow the gag, but it’s like a writer watched the news and did an exercise in what certain things could mean personally. And it deals a lot with ideas I think about a lot, like the non-existence of evil and redemption and justice. I just love when things are light and easy and very very heavy at the same time. It’s a quick easy read and yet so smart and profound. I think I really way way liked it. It’s kind of noir, and detectivish, but in a very light and heavy way.  You can tell it loves it’s hard-boiled, because the lead character is “James Thompson.”  Yup, it’s laid out there like that. It’s a good book.

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They’d just launder the clothing and offer it for sale, and some woman somewhere would wear a dead woman’s clothes and never know it.

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Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead by a little guy who liked his name so much he used it twice. Good he did the deed in L.A., and not, say, Walla Walla.

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There were plenty of MILFs, but nobody knew what to call them. Like serial killers. Abundant, but not yet labeled.

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definition, of which I was entirely ignorant at the time: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

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As far as I could tell, there were no signs pointing actively in that direction. I didn’t utter sentences with every fourth word italicized, I didn’t dress flamboyantly, I’d never argued the superiority of ballet to baseball. You could search my apartment from top to bottom and never turn up so much as a single Judy Garland record.

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“Now this is not the end,” he said. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

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Closure. That’s right up there with perspective. I don’t know what the hell it means.