Inspired by a glowing Rick Moody review in The Believer, I recently picked up Charlie Smith’s novel Three Delays. “[I]t makes the entire shelf of novels from the last generation superfluous,” says Moody? Sure, I’m in.
Right about now, I’m about two-thirds of the way through the novel. (So…two delays, then?) I have to say, I’m kind of regretting not emulating the daily Infinite Jest blogging done recently over at Bookavore. Three Delays is the kind of novel where my reactions shifted wildly every sixty pages or so, and I suspect that being able to track those shifts in opinion over time would have been entertaining. I began by finding the narrator (Billy) difficult to take, obsessive and temperamental and, generally, the kind of guy you’d hate to wind up talking with at a bar at three a.m. Then Billy let slip something about his past as a child preacher, and my take on him shifted; there was still a bit of an overly hard-boiled quality to the narration, but it too slipped away, and the perspective shifted so that the gap between author and narrator was more visible.
Two-thirds of the way through, and I’m still hooked, though a lot will depend on how Smith brings it all together. It doesn’t shy away from grand themes: love! And religion! And madness! And drugs! And art! It’s written in a style that alternately dwells on the moment and is effortlessly able to condense years of shared history into a few sentences. Still: for a story that’s intimate in scope, Smith’s ambitions are grand indeed. I have a day or two to go, and I’m fascinated to see where it’s all going to end up.