Okay, I'm going to respond to the Tana French stuff here and respond to the rest in the DM!
Oh my god, he was. Sherlock specifically! A red setter!! And the way French talks about mystery solving, like it's comparable to romance ("your dream girl").
The Likeness is actually one of my, like, three favorite books on earth. I love Cassie and I love her voice. I love the way she gets drawn into Lexie's life and home because it sounds just like things I've fantasized about: “It was like being one of those kids in books who find a magic spyglass that lets them into the secret life of some old painting, enthralling and risky” (75).
And I'm so so seduced by Whitethorn House myself. The renovating, and the way they all touch each other casually, and the cooking and shared meals and clothes. It's like--god, the way the four of them make this queer family:
“They probably had no more clue about real-life families than I did. I should have spotted from the beginning that this was one of the things they had in common…Consciously or subconsciously, they had collected every paper-thin scrap they could find and built their own patchwork, makeshift image of what a family was, and then they had made themselves into that.” (158)
And their whole thing is "no pasts." BUT it doesn't work because (1) Daniel is authoritarian about it and (2) they forgot that "no pasts" is not possible when you live in a house built by British colonizers in Ireland! So, like, the queer family falls apart, but I think for really good reasons--French is critiquing that mode of living when it's not attentive to historical violence and when it's not really egalitarian.
And the book does such a spectacular job of taking apart the female detective/female victim doubling that happens in a lot of mystery novels. Cassie really gets to wallow in that connection--the particularly feminized mode of being both vulnerable to violence and brazenly defiant of it. And they blur into each other, the two of them, in this heartbreaking and fascinating way.
And Lexie's mode of a sort of radical refusal of all ties, all "normal" life paths--another sort of queer mode of living:
"She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway. What I hadn’t managed to do even once, she had done easily as brushing her teeth. No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.” (186)
THE LANGUAGE AHHHH
Okay, I could keep going but I won't; I wrote a seminar paper on The Likeness awhile back and I will not rehash any more of it here. But. Those are my feelings.
Interesting! I actually didn't love Faithful Place--I like it, but it's not my favorite. I think I don't like Frank as much as the others, maybe? And maybe it's the dead ex-girlfriend thing and the delicate daughter whom he keeps disappointing because of work? I just get tired of those tropes. But that's so true about the dialogue; it is incredible. And I love In the Woods, and Broken Harbor. I don't know if I think The Secret Place totally works for me, structurally, but it's beautifully written.
Re: Tana French and your dissertation
Oh my god, he was. Sherlock specifically! A red setter!! And the way French talks about mystery solving, like it's comparable to romance ("your dream girl").
The Likeness is actually one of my, like, three favorite books on earth. I love Cassie and I love her voice. I love the way she gets drawn into Lexie's life and home because it sounds just like things I've fantasized about: “It was like being one of those kids in books who find a magic spyglass that lets them into the secret life of some old painting, enthralling and risky” (75).
And I'm so so seduced by Whitethorn House myself. The renovating, and the way they all touch each other casually, and the cooking and shared meals and clothes. It's like--god, the way the four of them make this queer family:
“They probably had no more clue about real-life families than I did. I should have spotted from the beginning that this was one of the things they had in common…Consciously or subconsciously, they had collected every paper-thin scrap they could find and built their own patchwork, makeshift image of what a family was, and then they had made themselves into that.” (158)
And their whole thing is "no pasts." BUT it doesn't work because (1) Daniel is authoritarian about it and (2) they forgot that "no pasts" is not possible when you live in a house built by British colonizers in Ireland! So, like, the queer family falls apart, but I think for really good reasons--French is critiquing that mode of living when it's not attentive to historical violence and when it's not really egalitarian.
And the book does such a spectacular job of taking apart the female detective/female victim doubling that happens in a lot of mystery novels. Cassie really gets to wallow in that connection--the particularly feminized mode of being both vulnerable to violence and brazenly defiant of it. And they blur into each other, the two of them, in this heartbreaking and fascinating way.
And Lexie's mode of a sort of radical refusal of all ties, all "normal" life paths--another sort of queer mode of living:
"She had held her whole life, everything she was, as lightly as a wildflower tucked in her hair, to be tossed away at any second as she took off burning streaks down the highway. What I hadn’t managed to do even once, she had done easily as brushing her teeth. No one, not my friends, not my relatives, not Sam or any guy, had ever hit me like this. I wanted to feel that fire rip through my bones, I wanted that gale sanding my skin clean, I wanted to know if that kind of freedom smelled like ozone or thunderstorms or gunpowder.” (186)
THE LANGUAGE AHHHH
Okay, I could keep going but I won't; I wrote a seminar paper on The Likeness awhile back and I will not rehash any more of it here. But. Those are my feelings.
Interesting! I actually didn't love Faithful Place--I like it, but it's not my favorite. I think I don't like Frank as much as the others, maybe? And maybe it's the dead ex-girlfriend thing and the delicate daughter whom he keeps disappointing because of work? I just get tired of those tropes. But that's so true about the dialogue; it is incredible. And I love In the Woods, and Broken Harbor. I don't know if I think The Secret Place totally works for me, structurally, but it's beautifully written.