I agree with Lauren that this book has an old style of writing. I can't figure it out but nobody writes this way anymore I really don’t even know what to make of it. It wasn’t as bad as the other infamous book we read but it wasn’t good. I can't remember ever reading a book in that style and besides that the whole thing came across as really insensitive to the events of 9/11. Here as just some things that I picked out of my notes that I wanted to bring up on the forum.
I refer to Price's awkward appropriation of 9/11 as a frame for his tale but I didn’t really buy the whole thing. I felt for some reason that it just did not fit in right. To me it seemed very unorganized in an organized way.
The subject of 9/11 came up from time to time but Mabry seems indifferent to the unfolding of the news or the feelings it might bring on as I took it he dismissed it as repetitive.
Of course, it was repetitive, but it didn't stop a society from seeing and hearing it over and over again, and speaking and thinking of nothing else. Which brings us back to a reoccurring theme that we were all numbed by the media footage and mesmerized all over the world as it was replayed over and over again.
Mabry spends the night of September 11 with the Halifax family. I felt like he already was done with the whole thing and had planned his trip to North Carolina, and was more interested in telling a kid about the little painting he is carrying than the fate of his friends and family or the nation in regards to 9/11.
When he finally gets back to New York, we learn more about his fondness for the Algonquin Hotel than anything else about the shell-shocked city where he has lived much of his adult life. Which I though was kind of lame.
Trasker Kincaid, the old priest, is the greatest enigma of the cast. He doesn't really get much of a role and is not an attractive character. But he does answer my complaint of detachment from global events. A certain Apathy.
Later when the priest confesses to Mabry his love for his long-dead son, presumably the "good" priest's son, Trasker says some quote to the likes of the death of one isn’t more important than the WTC tragedy which was kind of weird for me.