![]() What Watts has done here is more captivating than another retread about the persistence of a crook’s dream. All of this is conveyed in a prose style that renders the common language of casual speech into natural poetry, blending intimate conversation with the rhythms of gossip, town legend, even song lyrics. Little happens in this novel in any traditional sense, but it seems constantly in motion because Watts is so captivating a writer. Without yoking herself to some cumbersome Greek chorus, Watts has invented a communal voice that’s infinitely flexible, capable of surveying the whole depressed town or lingering tenderly in a grieving mother’s mind. plural narrator, knowing and wry, is just one of the novel’s rich pleasures. Watts has written a sonorous, complex novel that’s entirely her own. If you know Fitzgerald’s story intimately, it might be interesting, in some minor, academic way, to trace the lines of influence on her work, but in general that’s a distraction. Surprise: Watts’s novel is unfairly freighted with this allusion to its distant, white ancestor. ![]()
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