Slacks for Ella Funt

This was our book club book. The book club has been an off and on affair, and in it’s current incarnation, we’re reading only books set in New York. Generally, we try to pick books 400 pages or less, and, annoyingly, a lot of the time people don’t even bother to read them. This time, we picked Winter’s Tale, which is significantly longer, and then went several months without meeting.

I had actually read Winter’s Tale over the summer, and didn’t much like it, so I decided that I had read it recently enough to not need to reread it for book group. I really need more of a plot and characters that are developped to make it through 700 pages. In Winter’s Tale, it seems like Helprin just thought of a bunch of beautiful, fantastical images of New York (leaping through the city on a big white horse, a cloud wall at the edge of the city, a beautiful consumptive heiress on a penthouse roof in the snow) and strung them together without much effort to create a coherent narrative.

As usual, the opinions in the book group were mixed between people who, like me, needed a plot and people who were swept away by the images.