The Stars and the Cookie Jar

I just bought four shirts and a pair of jeans. It would have been six shirts, a pair of jeans, and a dress, but I balked at spending so much money even at Old Navy.

Is my wife happy now?

We'll see.


(I may let her buy me the dress. She feels all happy when she does things like that.)

Onward! To the shoe websites.

So. I got off the bus at the bookshop (don't ascribe me any physical-fitness virtues; I got on the bus again for the three stops after the bookshop when I was done) and by around 8:30, I started reading Gentlemen and Players.

I've just finished Gentlemen and Players.

I think it's the Brandeis graduate's version of a beach novel.

It's disconcertingly modern, for a Joanne Harris novel -- usually she needs a good running-up distance of a quarter century to land in medias res -- and takes place in the general present day, with e-mail and references to pop culture and other things mildly unusual for her.

And it's based completely, entirely on a great big large huge conceit. I had to go back and check, in dialogue and in description, that she carried it off, and she did. And I was fooled. Gentlemen and Players doesn't have the alluring (to me) subject of Chocolat, and its plot isn't as good at the core as Five Quarters of the Orange, but Harris wins, this time, wins big at doing what she set out to do. She picks her conceit and is entirely, rigorously faithful to it.

If you liked Donna Tartt's A Secret History, you'll like Gentlemen and Players. And not just for such gems as Hic magister podex est. There is a decaying, traditional, uppity school; there's an astute Classics master.

There's also a GREAT WALLOPING PSYCHOPATH WHO GOES AROUND KILLING PEOPLE WTF Joanne Harris. She's done morally ambiguous, unreliable protagonists bunches of times, but never someone this cheerfully industrious about knocking people off.

I don't know if it's an enduring pillar of literary genius, but I liked it.