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taylorhousebooks's review against another edition
4.0
Mr. White's Confession was well-written and compelling. Character development was solid and entertaining, with enough narrative for the reader to feel in on the secret. The ending was somewhat unsatisfying in its lack of firm resolution, but I feel like Clark was trying to impart a message rather than solve the whodunit. I think he accomplished this, with eloquence.
kirstiecat's review against another edition
4.0
This was interesting...mainly delving into the corruption of the police in the 1940s era and it develops a story of murder and intelligence both. I think it's well crafted with a likable victim who has a hidden eloquence despite his limited life experience in many areas. At the same time, it's not the kind of novel that is life changing..just an enjoyable read overall. I especially loved the parts about photography and the protagonist is a very likable photographer...you can't help feeling sorry for what befalls him. He is gentle, sad and beautiful and throughout time those type of humans have been drastically misused and under-appreciated.
Truly, this novel is about injustice and, though times have changed quite a bit, I'm sure that there are those still mistreated and wrongly imprisoned throughout all of the states in our country...
This is also a work of fiction and yet one can see how it could easily happen during this or any time since.
pg. 23 "I mixed chemicals for the darkroom in the kitchen in order to prepare the last roll I took of Ruby from The Aragon...working with the lights off-or rather with only the red safe light on-is a strange sensation, like what I imagine being deep underwater must be like. And I must say I have imagined that this is what death must be like., or the passage into death, a kind of blind trudge into the dark."
pg 26 "Maybe the future world is wishing for is a rather dangerous time, and that is part of the hollowness one feels."
pg 83 "I always think Sunday's sort of the saddest day...like the world's empty. Like nobody's home."
pg. 323 "Maybe I was only looking at the world. It was just a photograph. But perhaps now in my poverty, in my solitude, perhaps I'm in the world truly, at last. I can feel it in my flesh. I can see it and smell it and I have no other course but to love it."
Truly, this novel is about injustice and, though times have changed quite a bit, I'm sure that there are those still mistreated and wrongly imprisoned throughout all of the states in our country...
This is also a work of fiction and yet one can see how it could easily happen during this or any time since.
pg. 23 "I mixed chemicals for the darkroom in the kitchen in order to prepare the last roll I took of Ruby from The Aragon...working with the lights off-or rather with only the red safe light on-is a strange sensation, like what I imagine being deep underwater must be like. And I must say I have imagined that this is what death must be like., or the passage into death, a kind of blind trudge into the dark."
pg 26 "Maybe the future world is wishing for is a rather dangerous time, and that is part of the hollowness one feels."
pg 83 "I always think Sunday's sort of the saddest day...like the world's empty. Like nobody's home."
pg. 323 "Maybe I was only looking at the world. It was just a photograph. But perhaps now in my poverty, in my solitude, perhaps I'm in the world truly, at last. I can feel it in my flesh. I can see it and smell it and I have no other course but to love it."
davidwright's review against another edition
4.0
Did he or didn’t he? Did hapless, memory-challenged Herbert White murder two of the dance hall girls that he worshipfully photographed in his rooms, or is he a perfect patsy - a sacrificial lamb doomed to suffer for another’s crimes? That is the question that pulls you into Clark’s evocative psychological suspense, a question that Mr. White himself could not tell you the answer to. Once immersed in Clark’s evocative depression era Midwest, a hard-edged world through which innocent and guilty alike make their tenuous way, no simple solution will satisfy us, and psychology itself has become just another trap for the unwary. E.M. Forster once described rounded (as opposed to flat) characters as being ‘capable of surprising in a convincing way,’ and Clark’s characters fill that bill, bringing a haunting complexity to a genre too often given to the simplistic morality of sorting the good guys from the bad. This is a literary mystery in the best possible sense.
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