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A review by katieinca
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
3.0
This is me trying to give literary fiction a try again, based on a hearty recommendation from my bookshop and the fact that this was literary fiction about people who actually have to worry about money and personal safety. Great for learning some history. Not so much for emotional impact.
Some really beautiful prose here and there, but the two characters who ought to be driving the book aren't the most interesting ones. Rye, who gets most POV chapters, is young, shy, and maybe meant to be a nice clean slate for the reader to identify with. But he's just not that interesting or compelling until very late in the book. And then there's Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who's supposed to be larger than life. She was a real person, and maybe that makes it hard to write her, but she didn't feel like flesh and blood.
And it's not that the writer can't do that. There's this schtick in the book where we get the occasional chapter from someone else (and you figure out early on that if the chapter title has a year with that character's name, it's a death scene). The chapters from Rye's brother Gig, the detective Del Dalveaux, and Rye and Gig's friend Jules the Salish Indian all had more life. I'd read a second book if one of those guys were the narrator, but not another one featuring Rye and Flynn.
Some really beautiful prose here and there, but the two characters who ought to be driving the book aren't the most interesting ones. Rye, who gets most POV chapters, is young, shy, and maybe meant to be a nice clean slate for the reader to identify with. But he's just not that interesting or compelling until very late in the book. And then there's Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who's supposed to be larger than life. She was a real person, and maybe that makes it hard to write her, but she didn't feel like flesh and blood.
And it's not that the writer can't do that. There's this schtick in the book where we get the occasional chapter from someone else (and you figure out early on that if the chapter title has a year with that character's name, it's a death scene). The chapters from Rye's brother Gig, the detective Del Dalveaux, and Rye and Gig's friend Jules the Salish Indian all had more life. I'd read a second book if one of those guys were the narrator, but not another one featuring Rye and Flynn.