THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT
Still turning to my own book shelf for my reading. This time, a traditional summer book.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Depot Master by Joseph C Lincoln C
I've certainly been unlucky in my last two selections. It has become a long-standing tradition of mine to return to old Cape Cod via a Joe Lincoln book each summer. This time I selected one of his earlier books, The Depot Master. It proved to be a "fix-up novel" before the term was ever invented.
The first clue was on the copyright page. It read "Copyright 1910 by D Appleton and Company. And was published in May 1910. (My copy is the A L Burt Company edition, which is I believe a reprint likely from a later date.) However below this copyright is a list of other copyright dates from 1907 to 1909 by such companies as the Ainslee Magazine Company, The Frank A Munsey Company, F F Collier and Son, as well as several others. Which tells the tale of this book. It is a collection of short stories, woven into a novel, of sorts.
The original story in this book, the one that makes it a novel - of sorts - is that in his youth, the title character, the Depot Master, had an argument with his fiancée over where to spend their honeymoon, and both being stubborn, had a falling out over it. She eventually married someone else, who died, and left her to shift for herself, which she did with a small craft shop, that doesn't quite pay the bills. Now a rich city person in the new mansion as bought up her mortgage and is going to toss her into the street in order to move a different house onto that lot. Of course you know how this turns out. This plot is a thin thread in the narration.
What you have instead is all these friend of the Depot Master stopping by and spinning yarns about their experiences or those of their acquaintances, all of which had previously been stand alone short stories. In this book they a sliced and diced into a narrative of sorts, making for a "novel" of some 380 pages.
The problem is that I'm not a fan of short stories, even short "humorous" stories, which Joe Lincoln started his writing career with. I find short stories are like unfunny jokes. They're mostly just build up to the punch line, or rather the "clever" twist. And since most of the characters in the short stories only appear in that story, that's not long enough for me to care about them, or their fate. The only short stories I like are the ones with continuing characters, like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, or Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, i.e. with characters you know and who have a history beyond the narrow limits of a short story.
So, long story short, another disappointment. I'm going to have to pick a sure thing next...
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