Has anyone else noticed a spectacular and embarrassing  silliness among the old guard of East Coast scribblers? As though they were trying to write comic books, and couldn’t figure out how to convert text into images? Gone are the wry, dry, street talk, the inside cracks of persons, cities, institutions. Gone are the political or intellectual references and resonances. Gone are the  differences, the mannerisms, the languages that make themselves loved or remembered or both.

Advice? Use a pen not a keyboard, and write your age.

Wonderful, well developed characters modeled on silly, overchewed, Oprah-certified victim-types. The victim of an alcoholic, depressive, schadenfreude-mother, the victim of a childhood kidnapping by a pedophile, the victim of an unforgiving corrections system, the victim of overwhelming emotions, overwhelming fears, overwhelming doubts, of poor parents, poor teachers, poor morals, poor taste. But magnetic and memorable, nonetheless. The woman who for no apparent reason leaves a pleasant husband and a pleasant child is a curiosity: for the police, for us. The mild mannered husband with quiet habits and no past is, likewise, unusual, and leaves us wondering.

Lots of interesting characters on Blossom Street: a widow with an adopted daughter, a tough ex-punk happily married and unhappily smoking,  a good son and chocolate factory owner with a growing heart problem,   a charmed and charming owner of a knitting store,  a gorgeous single girl getting over an ex-fiancee who fancied prostitutes. Too bad all the characters sound like a relentlessly perky meet-and-greet girl selling God on morning talk radio.

The first murder victim is a horror list of character flaws with L.A. citizenship:

1. She could not be bothered to make the car payments on the first of each month, even though her parents took care of the down payment.
2. She lives in a dump in Sherman Oaks but she tells everyone she lives in Van Nuys.
3. She teeters out of a bar at 3 in the morning and can’t find her car in the parking lot— but it is not her fault—why don’t they put lights in the parking lot?
4. She runs out of gas on a freeway because she can’t be bothered to check the gas, or plan anything in advance.

A  collection of lost boys with dyslexia, poor little rich girls, orphans with personality disorders, meet in Atlanta, on different sides of the law.

It is said that this book does not reconstruct the Diana accident. It doesn’t. It reconstructs what might not have been an accident if a sensitive, guilt ridden orphan named Samuel Carver (“Call me Carver”) who threatens to break pinkies had arranged for a car to blow up in a tunnel in Paris. Carver, like other orphans before him, is an idiota, an innocent. He does not know who it is he has killed. What does Carver know? He knows he was adopted by a middle-aged couple who didn’t love him and sent him off to boarding school when he was eight. He knows how to run and he knows how to shoot and he knows how to fall asleep in the arms of his executioner, demonstrating a disarmed and disarming new-man vulnerability. And finally, in front of the T.V. news, he knows how to cry…. Maybe, not.

Once upon a time, when the Bronx was a happy Italian village full of children in Catholic school uniforms, public schools measured reading levels in Grades: first grade, second grade, third grade. Easy peasy. Consider your contemporary girly fiction, focused on 29 year old nitwits going shopping: second grade reading level. Consider, too, your average add-an-egg-and-mix murder mystery: the latest Carolyn Hart, for example: second grade reading level. Libraries must stop ordering and re-ordering these  Walmart quality timekillers and discover the beautiful prose of new and lovely conjurers—Louise Penny, and her new A Rule For Murder, for example.

Not since James Bond have we witnessed such a “spectacular mesomorph, built of  nothing except large quantities of bone, sinew and muscle.” Indeed, his body introduces him:

...with his shirt off  most people saw only his scars. He had a dozen minor nicks and cuts plus a dimpled 38 bullet hole in the left center of his chest and a wicked spider web of white lacerations low down on the right side of his abdomen all crisscrossed and puckered by 70 clumsy stitches done quick and dirty in a MASH unit…

This is the story of a jobless, homeless, carless, friendless stranger who walks into a diner and waits. And waits. The waitress never comes. After not eating, Jack is arrested for vagrancy, charged, tried, driven to the boundary, dumped in Hope and told to go away. He doesn’t.

“Salander was not a normal person.” Bandied about from one institution to another,  she has a casebook full of entries written by social workers, psychiatrists, administrators: serious Swedish officials. Because she does not speak, she is assumed to be stupid. She is not. Because she looks too young, she is assumed to be innocent. She is not. She is a child of the institution, its data and its archives, and she is at home among data, at home with texts. She rents her mother’s old flat, somewhere in Stockholm, and feeds herself like a latchkey child: thick bread sandwiches with cheese and liverwurst. She is contracted by a security firm to find confidential information and report it, piecemeal. One day she is assigned a case.

A house too old, with too many rooms and too many academics—all the elements of a ghost story, without a ghost.  Summer dissolves into eating, gardening, coupling, and conjecture: who is in the house?