I am reading Never Enough, Joe McGinniss‘s latest book. I was browsing at the Berkeley Public Library and there it was! It was a little like discovering a painting by Jackson Pollack in a thrift store. The typical book I want to read at BPL has 15 holds on it.
I am trying to read it as slowly as possible so that it will last as long as possible. It is surely the best book I have read this year. It is one of the best books I have read since I read The Miracle of Castel di Sangro (1999) by McGinniss, which was also incredibly good. That was another book hard to stop reading. In both books, the characters are bathed in a golden authorial light. Events are described with a beautiful simplicity, as if in a story for children, except what happens is intricate, meandering, morally complex, and true. In Miracle, McGinniss falls in love with the soccer team of a little town only to have his heart broken when they throw their last game. In Never Enough, a man is murdered — and then his brother, half a world away, is also murdered. (Which happened while McGinniss was writing about the first murder.) Surely the murders are unconnected yet how could they not be connected?
Your spoiler kind of … spoils Miracle.
as I told someone yesterday who’d seen the movie Atonement…Nabokov said, “Curiously enough you can never read a book you can only reread it.” He meant the first time you read a book learning the details of what happens, the plot, etc., gets in the way of appreciating the rest of it.
Thank you, Seth, for the generous comments about not one, but two of my books. I hope the SF Chronicle (if it’s still in business) hires you as its book editor (if it still has one) before my next book.