{"id":1079,"date":"2013-07-26T18:15:19","date_gmt":"2013-07-27T00:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1079"},"modified":"2013-07-26T18:15:19","modified_gmt":"2013-07-27T00:15:19","slug":"sara-gran-claire-dewitt-and-the-bohemian-highway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/sara-gran-claire-dewitt-and-the-bohemian-highway\/","title":{"rendered":"Sara Gran: Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When Annie Hall<\/i> first came out, I saw it with my mother.\u00a0 I was a senior in high school, and I was absolutely transported.\u00a0 It\u2019s still one of my favorite movies.\u00a0 My mother, on the other hand, was disturbed by it.\u00a0 She was dismayed by the easy way Annie moved in with Woody Allen\u2019s character, without being married, and the casual nature of the sexual relationships throughout the movie.\u00a0 It seemed like a sea-change to her.<\/p>\n

Sara Gran\u2019s novel, while I liked and appreciated it, feels like a sea-change to me, a generation later.\u00a0 I guess I\u2019m the now the older person reading about a younger one; about a younger person whose choices I don\u2019t always understand and whose \u201clifestyle\u201d is foreign to me.\u00a0 That\u2019s a good reason to read books, of course, and while Claire has a drug issue \u2013 it\u2019s presented as almost normal for her to be snorting cocaine off her house keys \u2013 it turns out that her drug use, like everything else in this novel, is a journey of self-discovery for her.\"clairebohemian\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was mostly captivated by this novel.\u00a0 Gran\u2019s voice is an original, witty, and at times, deeply profound one.\u00a0 And as an enthusiastic customer pointed out recently, \u201cher prose sings.\u201d<\/i>\u00a0 It does.\u00a0 She calls on tropes from mystery\u2019s long and varied history, referring obliquely to both Raymond Chandler and Nancy Drew, while at the same time telling an up to the minute story of a murdered musician whose devastated wife comes home and finds him, a robbery gone awry.\u00a0 Claire doesn\u2019t think it was a robbery.<\/p>\n

Curiously, Claire also resembles Jacqueline Winspear\u2019s Maise Dobbs in that she brings a kind of spiritual, empathic sensitivity to solving a case.\u00a0 She apparently studied with a great (sadly fictional, though a brilliant creation on the part of Gran) detective named Jacques Silette, whose followers are devoted utterly to the truth at all cost.<\/p>\n

Claire had a prior relationship with the dead man and is devastated by it as well as wanting to find out who killed him.\u00a0 Interspersed with her search for Paul\u2019s killer is a recollection of her first case with a high school friend \u2013 they searched for a missing friend of theirs.\u00a0 That story is resolved before the denouement of the main story, but it helps to tell Claire\u2019s backstory.\u00a0 While much of Gran\u2019s writing is layered with irony and self-conscious wit, she also brings her character of Claire very vividly to life.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also told in a very episodic way.\u00a0 Looking at Gran\u2019s biography, she writes for television (notably Southland, <\/i>a real favorite of mine, in part because of Regina King\u2019s kick-ass character on the show) so it may make sense that she writes in episodes.\u00a0 Everything is in brief, digestible pieces.\u00a0 Gran is for sure a talented writer; she actually does bring emotion into her resolution, which isn\u2019t unexpected, but it\u2019s heartbreaking.\u00a0 But while telling the story this way keeps Claire a bit of a mystery, it also left this reader, at least, wanting just a bit more. I personally prefer a more sustained narrative – but maybe that\u2019s a generational thing.\u00a0 Either way, episodic or sustained,\u00a0 this is a welcome new voice to mystery fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Annie Hall first came out, I saw it with my mother.\u00a0 I was a senior in high school, and I was absolutely transported.\u00a0 It\u2019s still one of my favorite movies.\u00a0 My mother, on the other hand, was disturbed by it.\u00a0 She was dismayed by the easy way Annie moved in with Woody Allen\u2019s character, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-1079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-p-i"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}