I'm back with an all-editing post that includes a chance for you, my loyal readers, to spot mistakes in a book by a Man Booker Prize–winning novelist.
Let's get started, but first, here's my usual caveat: I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness.
I finished reading Final Viewing, the first in the series of mystery stories with a funeral director protagonist who's also named Bill Hawley that I mentioned in a prior post. It was all right, but I'm not in any big hurry to read the second book.
The murder mystery was resolved in a somewhat-satisfactory manner, but the story ended up being more of a mob caper than the more-standard whodunit I was expecting.
The book was pretty well edited; I didn't find too much to complain about in it. But on page 125, there's an awkward switch from verb to noun in a grisly passage in which Hawley reminisces about the first body he had to pick up, at the age of 16, after having landed a job at a private ambulance company.
The guy had died in a motorcycle accident in which his right leg had been cut off at the hip. "The guys at the morgue had posted him (vernacular for postmortem, or autopsy), sewn him back up, more or less, and placed him in the drawer with his severed leg lying in its proper place." I would have put "meaning, they'd done their postmortem, or autopsy" inside the parentheses so as to get a verb in the explanation, since posted is a verb but postmortem and autopsy are nouns. (Well, autopsy can be a noun or a verb, but here it's being used as a synonym for postmortem, which can be a noun or an adjective and I would argue is a noun here.) I also would have wanted to put those two nouns in italics, as I've done in the prior sentence, because they're being used as words, though that might have been deemed too fussy for a paperback mystery.
On page 80, there's a reference to buying toys at "Kids R Us." That retailer, whose name was usually styled with the R in quotation marks, was a division of Toys R Us that sold children's clothing, not toys (or kids).
And on page 84, this sentence should have a comma after jar:
She rinsed out a jelly jar which she placed on the table in front of me, saying, "Belly up to the bar."
Actually, I would change that sentence to:
She rinsed out a jelly jar and then placed it on the table in front of me. "Belly up to the bar," she said.
In the November issue of Sky, Delta’s in-flight magazine, I read the following passage in an article about the changing economics of restaurants:
Will future folk look back on the way we tip the same way we look back at “room and board” as primitive and odd?
Some kind of punctuation mark is needed after the quote mark after board, either a colon or a dash. I’d go with the colon.
In "The Pursuit of Happiness," an article in the December issue of Martha Stewart Living that isn't available online yet, Ralph De La Rosa is described as a "mediation teacher." The context, a passage about "mindfulness meditation," suggests that job title ought to be meditation teacher, and De La Rosa's self-description on his website confirms it.
In this article about cocktails created by Paul Child—husband of Julia—from the November issue of Food & Wine, another hyphen and two en dashes are needed in the last sentence of the second paragraph to link all four of those spirits, not just vermouth, to the word based. The sentence should look like this:
And before dinner, they often entertained with gin-, dark rum–, rye whiskey–, and vermouth-based cocktails, a custom they continued when they returned to the U.S.
I thought about changing the and before vermouth to an or. The three recipes the story links to each contain only one of the four types of alcoholic beverage, but Child may have made more than one kind of cocktail at a given dinner, so I figured it was safer to leave the conjunction alone.
I enjoyed The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst, who's one of my favorite authors. I wouldn't put it up there with The Swimming-Pool Library, which I consider to be his best novel, or The Line of Beauty, which was also terrific, but it was mighty good.
Johnny Sparsholt was a great protagonist, starting in the second chapter of the book as a 14-year-old. But I longed to read more about his father, David, who was involved in the title affair. (Hollinghurst might tell me that he wanted David to remain as much of an enigma to the reader as he was to Johnny.) And I didn't find Evert Dax, another major character, to be all that compelling.
The punctuation in the book was idiosyncratic and, at times, what I would consider incorrect, like the comma after evasive, the dash after the question mark, and the semicolon, instead of an and, after desk in the following excerpts:
Ivan was cheerful, but evasive, he went ahead, unusually alert for things to comment on; while Johnny was caught almost at once in the strange lulled swoon of each warm step to step: he saw how his footprint flattened the new growth and crunched the soft stubble inseparably. (page 259)
Did his father even notice the things that sank on Johnny's spirits here?—perhaps, yes: at a level beneath thought, he was reassured by the clusters of maroon armchairs and sofas, the thin Georgian pretensions of the pastel-coloured panelling, the table lamps, the fake mahogany desk; was cheered by the tied-back chintz curtains and brightly lit portrait of the Queen. (pages 344-345)
The sentence before that one was: "A party of three got up, Johnny hovered and bagged the table, sat down in the low armchair looking blankly at their sudded half-pint mugs and the glass beaker of toothpicks." I haven't been able to find a definition of sudded. Assuming sudded is the correct word—and my best guess is that Hollinghurst intends it to mean containing suds—I would have rewritten that sentence as "A party of three got up, and Johnny hovered, bagged the table, and sat down in the low armchair looking blankly at their sudded half-pint mugs and the glass beaker of toothpicks."
Even this simple sentence is punctuated more complicatedly than is necessary:
"Oh, yes," said Johnny: "what's that?" (page 310)
Why is that colon there? I would have put a question mark after yes and a period after Johnny and would have capped the w in what's because the quoted words read like two questions to me. Johnny said those words in response to a declaration by his daughter's friend that the two of them had been reading Mary Rose, a play by J.M. Barrie that was unfamiliar to Johnny.
It happens again on page 323:
"I know," said Lucy: "I just don't know what I'll feel when the time comes."
Earlier in the book, quotes are punctuated in what I would call the usual way:
"We'll go straight to the Mitre," he said. "I need to press on with an article for Sweden." (page 81)
"Well," said Norma, "I suppose they grow out of things at that age." (page 134)
Finally, there are four things I would fix in this passage on page 294:
There's one thing that's definitely wrong and three other things I think are better changed or left out. I'll put my answers at the bottom of this post.
I hadn't seen such odd punctuation since I read The Professor's House by Willa Cather about a year ago. My current read is Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is Tony's favorite Cather novel.
In the sixth line, being should be changed to been; that's the definite mistake. I would also have moved only (in the fourth line) before at Cranley Gardens, because that better conveys what's meant: these friends would never see her anywhere but at Cranley Gardens. I would also remove both commas after Arabella. The first one isn't needed because we're continuing on to an essential, not a tangential, part of the description of Arabella. The second one isn't needed because there's been nothing more than a simple change in verb; no punctuation is called for there to aid the reader.