Mark Nelson's Reviews > Owning Up

Bought this book without realizing it was a set of four novellas, so disappointed that it was not a novel. I guess there is sort of a theme uniting them, but I can't quite put voice to it.

The writing is good, and of course Pelecanos trots out his love for and knowledge of DC, the entertainment business, criminals, and Greeks. But I feel like these novellas suffer a little bit from workshop disease, a term I use for writing that is trying to impress fellow writers more than entertain readers. In traditional modernist fashion, they have lots of great sentences but often lack a conventional beginning, middle, and end.

But great reading nonetheless.