About 2/3 of the way through Fieldwork the narrator says, Now I know this is going to seem like another pointless digression, but trust me. Unfortunately by that time my trust had run out.
Sort of an anthropological murder mystery, Fieldwork tries to get to the source of a mystery by laying out the histories of the participants. By histories, I mean starting with their great grandparents and working forward in minute detail. This isn’t as painful as it sounds, but it comes apart for two reasons. One is that the stories are laid out under a framing story about the author himself and his problems with his girlfriend which is incredibly uninteresting in comparison and led to a lot of skimming on my part. The other is that after getting the genealogy on one side of the fracas, we have to turn around and go all the way back to ancient history on the other side. At that point I really didn’t give a rat’s ass about X’s grandmother, I just wanted to hear why X murdered Y and be done with it. Sadly, even the answer to that question was not terribly intriguing and certainly not enough to make you feel like it had been worth the slog. I will have to start remembering where all these books get recommended from so I’ll know who to go complain to.
