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I do not like thee, Doctor Pearl
The reason why is
not mere churl
But you’re so smart — and hence my
qu’rrel —
Well, leaving the
nursery verse, seeing as how I can’t find an appropriate final rhyme,
your books, Dr. Pearl, just ought to be better than they are. Last summer I read the well-reviewed The Dante Club, wrote my own
reaction, more about me than the book. Decided to give his next literary
sleuthing, The Poe Shadow, a try and got so bored that I began skimming, then skipping, a
chunk here, a chunk there — no problem in missing anything, it moved
so ponderously. I did read the ending and historical note. It’s not
as good as The Dante Club, partly because Poe isn’t Dante and the narrator
isn’t the famous Cambridge poet/detectives, partly because it’s
too long, and mainly because you never come to care about the narrator, or
anybody in the book, even poor maligned Edgar Allan Poe. Also, it’s
told in the literary style of 1850, which Trollope, who lived then and
included every detail, makes interesting, but — at least to me
— Pearl doesn’t. So what’s The Poe
Shadow? A lawyer develops a mania to discover
how and why Poe died, convinced that he wasn’t a drunk in the
gutter. The book follows every winding alleyway, tedious
conversation, and inner ratiocination of that quest. The Dante book has
murders à la Alighieri, and Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow are the characters
and detectives. You come to know these real poets a little as they pursue
the villain and are shocked at the death of Longfellow’s wife —
her clothes catch fire — and touched by his tender love for his
bereft little daughters, Alice, Edith, and laughing Allegra. Did I miss the
tenderness in the Poe story? I appeal to you, dear reader, to engage me in
discussion of what makes these books worth the reviews they’ve
received. Meanwhile, so as not to waste it, here’s my aforementioned
nonreview:
just finished reading the
dante club
I’ve studied dante with charlie at uis
read virgil
in the original ditto holmes
lowell longfellow those first two
have
springfield streets named after them plus whittier who somehow didn’t
make the
cut maybe he didn’t know
enough dante I’m pretty well
versed
in christian theology lived in cambridge
crossed and recrossed
harvard yard
even went to a lecture by tillich once but ended up making grocery lists
have had
considerable secondhand
experience with mental illness so lots was going for me in this
book which the
nytimes raves is
sparkling with erudition but as a novel
well its
erudite and brilliant recent
harvard ph.d. needs a better editor
why
didn’t anybody on his long list
of credits get him to squash
out
a hundred pages or more it’d be
less tedious don’t
omit any of the horrific dante-esque murders though
they’ll
turn your guts to gravy
maybe I should try writing briefer
myself but
it’s hard to stop when you
know everything about everything
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times, is professor
emerita of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2007.
