Not Fully Loaded

Probably like most Elmore Leonard fans, we enjoyed his last novel, The Hot Kid (2005), kept up with his 2006 New York Times-serialized novella, Comfort to the Enemy, and were looking forward to his newest novel, Up in Honey’s Room. But critic David Abrams, writing today in January Magazine, suggests that Leonard’s latest might be less of a honey than its title suggests. Remarks Abrams:

Leonard is a master at literature-in-transit. By the time you turn to page 1, most of his stories are already careening along with guns a-blazing ...

The author, who cut his teeth in the twilight of the pulp era, doesn’t slow down for the reader--he expects us to make a running leap for the open door and get in, sit down, etc. His emphatic, declarative sentences make it easy for us to keep tumbling forward through the pages. We might not grasp everything, and the cavalcade of characters might start to blur our eyes, but Leonard’s sheer exuberance of language (both inter- and intra-sentence) makes everything compulsively readable, front to back. We don’t even have to care about the characters; Leonard does and that’s all that matters. He loves these flawed, offbeat characters of his. Words lick against their bodies in cool sentences like: “He heard his name called and turned to see a young guy in black holding a big heavy show-off nickel-plate automatic against his leg, the shoulders of his suit wide, zooty, the pants pegged at his light-tan shoes.” Elmore Leonard is the kind of writer who knows when a word like “zooty” will fit and when it will not, and for that we love him.

That kind of charitable forgiveness will carry readers a long way into his newest novel, Up in Honey’s Room, which turns out to be a rather disappointing, fair-to-middling entry in Leonard’s long line of crackling-good yarns. Honey is neither great, nor mediocre. If it was a movie, I’d say, “Wait for it to come out on DVD.”

You can read his entire review here.