Book Review: John D. MacDonald, Weep for Me (1951)

Weep for Me is one of two novels that Gold Medal let go out of print at John D. MacDonald’s request. (The other was 1963’s I Could Go on Singing.) So part of the exercise of reading it is trying to figure out why MacDonald disliked it so much. The set-up is standard Gold Medal fare: Narrator Kyle Cameron is a bank teller . . . actually, that’s probably all I need to tell you about the set-up . . . you know the rest. But the book takes a strange turn in its final act, and its ending is downright embarrassing—I don’t doubt that JDM hated it. He probably found much of its prose embarrassing too. Sample sentence: “They knew that the loins of this dark girl beside me were a trap that had closed on my soul” (98). But you might want to read it simply because JDM doesn’t want you to. Grade: C-