Word Made Flesh

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant but too brief.
Review: WORD MADE FLESH is laden with blood, violence, and horror, but the book is about none of these things. Rather, O'Connell is fascinated with the topic academics know as "semiotics": the strange and transformative relationship between an object or idea and the word we use to describe it.

The book is full of people who at some level are acting out their frustration at being unable to communicate, unable to make that fundamental connection with another human being. One character is driven mad by his inability to express the horror of an atrocity he witnessed decades ago in Eastern Europe, another is afflicted by a disease that attacks the brain's language centers, and the hero is a man broken by the death of his wife, the only person he could express himself to.

The prose is beautiful and haunting. The surface-level mystery plot makes most noir seem merely gray in comparison. And it all takes place against the backdrop of Quinsigamond, Maine, the most nihilistic city in the universe. The problem, though, is that O'Connell deploys an embarrasment of riches in his 326 pages and doesn't linger long enough on any one idea, character, or plot point to give it the emotional impact it merits. Trying to fit all his ideas into a book as slim as WORD MADE FLESH is like trying to tour the Smithsonian in a day. Also, it seems to be assumed that the reader is familiar with his earlier, impossible-to-find Quinsigamond books. Despite all this, though, the book is wonderfully worth reading -- because, though his fictional world is crude and nihilistic, O'Connell himself is not, and every word he writes is incandescent with compassion and fiery, holy rage against both the fictional hell of Quinsigamond and the real world that it holds a mirror to.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant but too brief.
Review: WORD MADE FLESH is laden with blood, violence, and horror, but the book is about none of these things. Rather, O'Connell is fascinated with the topic academics know as "semiotics": the strange and transformative relationship between an object or idea and the word we use to describe it.

The book is full of people who at some level are acting out their frustration at being unable to communicate, unable to make that fundamental connection with another human being. One character is driven mad by his inability to express the horror of an atrocity he witnessed decades ago in Eastern Europe, another is afflicted by a disease that attacks the brain's language centers, and the hero is a man broken by the death of his wife, the only person he could express himself to.

The prose is beautiful and haunting. The surface-level mystery plot makes most noir seem merely gray in comparison. And it all takes place against the backdrop of Quinsigamond, Maine, the most nihilistic city in the universe. The problem, though, is that O'Connell deploys an embarrasment of riches in his 326 pages and doesn't linger long enough on any one idea, character, or plot point to give it the emotional impact it merits. Trying to fit all his ideas into a book as slim as WORD MADE FLESH is like trying to tour the Smithsonian in a day. Also, it seems to be assumed that the reader is familiar with his earlier, impossible-to-find Quinsigamond books. Despite all this, though, the book is wonderfully worth reading -- because, though his fictional world is crude and nihilistic, O'Connell himself is not, and every word he writes is incandescent with compassion and fiery, holy rage against both the fictional hell of Quinsigamond and the real world that it holds a mirror to.