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-
I liked it a bit more than you did, but I agree about the ending.
ReplyDeleteJDM had me primed not to like it. . . . I was just looking for a reason!
ReplyDeleteWhat's wrong with “They knew that the loins of this dark girl beside me were a trap that had closed on my soul”?
ReplyDeleteI find it easy to believe that the later JDM, especially given his sometime pretentiousness, would find the image of vaginal lips as metaphysical bear trap to be rather artless and over the top.
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