On Film Adaptations and Atonement

A mistake I am known to make is rushing to read a book before the movie comes out. I say this is a mistake, because inevitably what ends up happening is the book is then too fresh in my mind when I see the movie, and all I can see are the differences. I know this is something that's happened to me several times, but the example I remember most clearly is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The beginning or very nearly the beginning of the movie is set somewhere toward the middle of the events in the book and features a character whom, in the book, we believe – at that point in time – may be dead. This infuriated me on first watching the film, on Christmas Day of 2011, five months after finishing the book. I've since watched the movie several more times. The book has grown more and more distant in my memory, and the movie I quite like. I almost never do it on purpose, but I honestly think the better order of things is to watch a movie before reading the book it was adapted from. You will almost always get more out of the book, so it's unlikely to disappoint. 

Last night, I watched the 2007 film Atonement, based on the Ian McEwan novel, which I read in 2003. In cases like this, when that much time has passed (or even half as much), between my reading of a book and the release of a movie, I find myself thinking I should re-read the book so it's fresh in my memory. I think I'm afraid seeing the movie will cancel out the book in my mind. But my experience watching Atonement suggests something else. 

I really liked the book Atonement when I read it. I went on to read three other Ian McEwan books on the strength of my feelings about Atonement, none of which I liked as well. Nearly 20 years on, I remembered very little. I wasn't particularly interested in the movie when it came out. I remember being aware that it came out, but I don't remember hearing much about it. I imagine I thought it couldn't stand up to the book. It was only much more recently that I heard anything at all about the movie that made me curious. Specifically, it was something about the green dress Keira Knightly wears in the film. I'm not sure if it was this article or another, but I remember being surprised to learn the film featured any costume that was now considered iconic, given how little I'd heard about it at the time. Anyway, I can't say I thought about it much again until I was scrolling on HBO last night, saw that it was streaming, and rather impulsively decided to watch it. I really enjoyed it. I felt like I remembered just enough of the story – or perhaps more accurately that I'd forgotten just enough of the story. 

I see on Goodreads I only gave Atonement 4 stars, but I suspect if I had rated it at the time I read it I would have given it 5. (In 2009, I went back and retroactively added and rated every book I'd read as far back as I kept records, so all ratings for books I read before 2009 are based on how much I remembered liking them in 2009.) I think my high opinion of the book faded a bit as acclaim for it grew. The other thing I see when I look up Atonement on Goodreads is a review by my ex-husband, written in 2007 – a year after we split up – though I am nearly certain he actually read the book while we were together. That this review exists is a surprise to me. I can only imagine that he meant to offend (maybe just to kid – maybe I'm thinking too badly of him) when he, apparently, suggested that Harry Potter fans would enjoy it. In any case, his middling opinion undoubtedly negatively affected my own feelings about the book (an unfortunate theme in our relationship). In any case, seeing the movie actually reminded me how much I once liked the book. Maybe I should watch more movies of books I read decades ago. 

Loving Day, by Mat Johnson

Mat Johnson is a writer I know of because of Twitter. I've followed him there for years, though I can't remember how I initially found my way to him. Several years ago, I found a copy of his book Pym at the thrift shop I used to frequent on my lunch break back when I worked in Murray Hill. I didn't buy it, a decision I found myself soon after when I read (again, I have no idea where, though likely also on Twitter) something that made me curious to read it. It has stayed in the back of my mind. Last year, when I was visiting the Bay Area over Thanksgiving, I found Loving Day at a San Francisco thrift shop and I saw it as an opportunity to correct my mistake. I came very close to starting it that week. I think I had in mind that if I finished it while I was there, I could leave it behind with the friend I was visiting, who is biracial. Knowing nothing about it besides the title, I thought it might be of particular interest to her (and indeed, while I was reading it, I thought that several times again). I'm having a hard time remembering any off the top of my head, though I'm sure I've read other books that center mixed race characters. But Loving Day is surely the only book I've read that is specifically about being mixed race. What's odd is that this is so remarkable. Loving Day is about a biracial man, recently divorced, who moves back home to Philadelphia where he discovers he has a teenaged daughter, whom he was previously unaware of. His daughter, the product of a relationship he had as a teenager with a Jewish girl, has been raised as a white Jew, though we eventually learn she had suspicions that she was part Black. This was a funny and sweet book.

Home Reading Service, by Fabio Morábito

Last Friday evening, I started Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, a book I found recently in the Little Free Library near my apartment. (At the same time, I also found a copy of Lolita, which I read some 25 years ago and grabbed anyway because I own nearly every other book by Nabokov and I figured I should round out my collection. I wondered if the two books may have been left there by the same person, at the same time.) I found myself really enjoying it. I was drawn in by the narrator's voice, by a familiar self-loathing heterosexuality and disgust with the physical body. Over the next couple days, I read 150 pages and then on Sunday around 5pm I had to stop reading abruptly as I saw what was about to come (which should have been quite clear to me from the beginning, and yet hadn't stopped me then). Around 2am that night, I woke up feeling anxious about the book and fretted about it for an hour or so before I could fall asleep again. Monday morning, I stared at it on my coffee table. I was only about 80 pages from finishing it, but I couldn't face it. 

Instead I picked up another book from my coffee table, which I had found in that same Little Free Library just two days earlier: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito. I didn't know anything about this book or its author before I found it. It seems not much has been translated into English, but this book was the recipient of Mexico's 2018 Premio Xavier Villarrutia and was released in English* last year. Set in Cuernavaca, the book is narrated by Eduardo who — in the wake of a never-described driving accident — has been mandated to perform community service. A priest friend of his sister's arranges for him to do this in the form of serving as a reader in the homes of the old and infirm. He has five clients: a pair of elderly brothers, a retired military man, a deaf family who read lips, a partly paralyzed aspiring opera singer, and a couple who appear to be in perfect health and of means, so that he has no idea why they've been offered his services. The book follows a trail of funny, unexpected events, intrigues, and tragedies among these characters and others in his life as Eduardo comes to terms with himself. This was a really fun read.

* Here's a fun interview with the book's translator. 

Garden by the Sea, by Mercè Rodoreda

Garden by the Sea is the third book I've read by Mercè Rodoreda. I read A Broken Mirror in 2018, which is unfortunately a year I took off from writing about the books I read. I say "unfortunately" because today I find it hard to remember much about it. I have images in my mind (it must have been a very visual book!) of the house in Barcelona where the story takes place, the garden with its fountain, the wall outside the house, the foyer, the staircase, the bedrooms; images of a jeweler's shop, a brooch, a carriage, a street. I do remember bits of the story, but more I remember the general mood: aching, melancholic, nostalgic. I loved it. I named it one of my favorite books I read that year. 

About a year later, I read Rodoreda's most famous book, The Time of the Doves. I have a lot of lingering mental images from this book too— most distinctly, a room on the top of a building filled with pigeons— and the memory of a mood: poverty, privation, war in the distance. But I didn't love The Time of the Doves the way I did A Broken Mirror. I found the story sometimes hard to follow and the narrative style — sort of stream of consciousness — a bit disengaging. Most of all, there was something about the relationship between the narrator and her husband that never quite clicked for me. I couldn't understand why she loved him, why she put up with him, why she let him fill that room at the top of their house with pigeons! It never felt like he loved her in return. And, I mean, I know such relationships exist; I was just unconvinced by this one. 

So I guess you could say that going into Garden by the Sea, I was hopeful that I would find another A Broken Mirror and a little wary that I might find instead another The Time of the Doves. I'm pleased to report it was the former. I knew within just a few pages that I would love this book. Garden by the Sea is narrated by the aging gardener at the seaside estate that serves as the summer home for a wealthy young couple from Barcelona. The reader develops an affection for the gardener and we do learn a little about his story and quite a lot about his lifestyle, but the main story he tells us is of a love triangle between the Senyora of the house, her husband, and her childhood sweetheart, who shows up, suddenly a wealthy, married man, on the neighboring seaside estate. The book has an upstairs/downstairs quality, where the reader gets to listen in on the gossip of the gardener, cooks, and housekeepers. It's been a very long time since I read The Remains of the Day — and the gardener is a very different kind of narrator (a different kind of person) from that book's butler — but I found myself thinking of it as I read Garden by the Sea with its secondhand plot. 

Like the other two Rodoreda books I've read, Garden by the Sea is also an intensely visual book. Flowers are ever-present, defining each moment of the season as they bloom and die, or are picked for a bouquet or trampled at a party or under attack by aphids or unearthed and repotted. But there are so many other visual details as well: the specific color of the dresses the gardener's long-dead wife wore; the rowboat, with its red paint peeling over the years, and then repainted; the old eucalyptus tree; the little beach at the bottom of the stairs below the garden; the swimming pool on the neighboring estate that is lit from inside(!); the sunflower wallpaper at the local inn that the gardener buys to repaper his own kitchen; the handmade envelopes where the gardener stores his seeds. I can picture all these things. I have such a strong, tangible image of this lovely seaside villa and the Catalonian town where it stood, and it's stunning. 

Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson

I spent last week in upstate New York dog-sitting and I thought that between the train rides up and back and the quiet of the country I would get a lot of reading done. Instead, I watched a Mission Impossible movie every night for five consecutive nights and I couldn't tell you what happened to any other downtime I had while I was away. I cooked. I walked the dog. I did some crossword puzzles. I worked some long days. I read a few chapters of a book I had high hopes for but wasn't feeling at the moment. I did not trade it for either of the other two books I had brought with me. When I arrived back home on Saturday night, Big Sky was waiting for me, having been delivered while I was away. I've read and enjoyed all the previous Jackson Brodie novels, and I loved the three non-Jackson Brodie novels by Kate Atkinson that I've read, so yesterday - with the prospect of a lazy day at home after a week away - I decided to start Big Sky. 

This book satisfied in the ways that I expected it to. I read more than 200 pages yesterday and nearly as many today. The book has a sometimes confusing jumble of characters circling around a sex trafficking ring, the unraveling of which happens partly by accident. The reader gets the full story, but most of the characters never do. The closure sates. What was lost on me this time were all the callbacks to the earlier books, which I only remember faintly now. I read them all in the space of a year in 2015-2016. I remember some rough plot outlines and a few details, but not much really. There were characters in this book who figured in the earlier novels, but I didn't remember them at all. I don't know that it would be worth going back and re-reading all four prior books, but I think I would have enjoyed Big Sky more if I had.

In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz

I became aware of In the Distance soon after it came out in 2017, I believe, though I don't remember how I became aware of it. I was surprised and thrilled to find a copy at the Goodwill in Greenwich Village not long after it had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. I picked it up and contemplated reading it several times between then and now. I would read the blurb and it just never felt like the thing I wanted to be reading at whatever particular moment I found myself in. It was this tweet from last September that nudged me closer to reading it. I decided to read it "soon," and soon finally became now last Sunday. 

Let me start by saying this book was stunning. It was sometimes hard to read, one troubling event piles on top of another, again and again as the book goes on. There's hardly a break from the trouble. And yet, it's beautiful. 

Early on while reading In the Distance I thought it was like a picaresque. The book is episodic as Håkan, a Swedish immigrant who arrives in San Francisco in the early 19th century as a boy, picks up with – or is picked up by – different characters. Some are benefactors, some are using him. Each chapter presented a new adventure or circumstance in his travels. But then other characters largely disappear from the book after one particularly bad episode. Håkan spends months and years in deep solitude. Though, with a couple exceptions, the time he spends with people is no less lonely than his time alone. People in this book are terrifying for the harm they are prepared to do to one another. Håkan begins the book as a total innocent, and some element of that innocence stays with him throughout. Meanwhile his notoriety  grows as he unwittingly becomes a figure of myth across the West. In the public imagination he is a person dramatically different from the real Håkan, but the real Håkan – filled with shame over his own actions – seems partly to believe that he deserves this public censure. He avoids other humans because he fears what they will do to him, but also because he fears what they will think of him. He is afraid to face them. The book itself represents the first time he tells his own story to anyone. (It's told in the third person, but it's framed as a narrative he gives of his own life to fellow passengers on an iced-in boat near Alaska.)

Unless I'm forgetting something, this is only the second Western novel I've read, the other being Butcher's Crossing, which I also found hard to read yet beautiful. The two books do inhabit the same moment for a stretch – the events of Butcher's Crossing take place in the space of a year, while In the Distance spans decades. In the Distance imagines a person inhabiting a long period of American history and westward expansion, and yet so removed from the world of humans that the external events of history are almost invisible to him. 

The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli; Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I spent the week before last in Mexico. Specifically, I did a road trip through Yucatán and Campeche states with my father, with overnight stays in Valladolid, Mérida, and San Francisco de Campeche. A week before I was due to travel it was time for me to start a new book. I wanted to read something Mexican, ideally something from the Yucatán peninsula, but my (admittedly limited) research didn't turn up anything I could find easily in English. I looked to books I already owned, and narrowed the options to three: The Story of My Teeth, Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, and One Out of Two by Daniel Sada, and then I put the question of which I should read on Twitter and Instagram. I got four votes for The Story of My Teeth and one for Hurricane Season (I'm hardly a social media star), so I decided to take the majority's advice and I started the former. 

I only managed to read one chapter of The Story of My Teeth before I left for my travels. I read the second chapter on the plane to Cancun. (With my plans to visit Campeche, I was thrilled, when reading on the plane, to come across this sentence: "In my opinion, outside my native land, only Paris is worth a mention, but even so, we all know that the city of Campeche beats Paris hands down.") And then, as is so common when I travel, I didn't pick up the book again for the duration of my trip. I thought I might resume my reading on my flight home, but I was so exhausted I just listened to music and did crossword puzzles for the length of the flight. I read the remainder of The Story of My Teeth today. This was an interesting book about a fictional auctioneer who creates a practice of allegorical auctions, where the value of the objects being auctioned off is enhanced by the story the auctioneer relates about the objects' sourcing. The book is full of intertextual references to centuries of philosophy, contemporary art, and literature (largely, but not entirely, Mexican). More interesting than the book itself is the story of its creation, which Luiselli explains in an Afterword. The book was created to accompany an art exhibit at a gallery in Ecatepec, just outside Mexico City, run by the Mexican juice company Jumex. She serialized the book and worked with Jumex to arrange that the installments be read in a reading group made up of workers in the Jumex factory. She heard their reactions after each installment and used these, as well as some of their own stories and ideas, as she developed the subsequent installments. I found her explanation of this process really beautiful, and when she reported that two of these workers showed up for her book launch in Mexico City, it brought tears to my eyes. 

While we were in Mexico, I talked with my dad about my struggle to find books by authors from the Yucatán. I said it seemed there were none available in English. My father wondered if there were any at all. I believed there had to be. My dad, a native of Wichita, KS, argued that maybe some places didn't produce writers, using his childhood hometown as an example. I found an entire Wikipedia page listing authors from Wichita, but it's true most of them weren't literary authors. (The only people I'd heard of on the list were former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the journalist Jim Lehrer, and member of the Eagles, Joe Walsh; however, there were also some novelists among those listed.) My father then suggested that perhaps there were no great writers from Dallas, TX, and it seems this may in fact be the case (my dad is the one who did the additional searching here, and I'm too lazy to do more, so we'll have to trust him on that one). Meanwhile, I went on to argue that the Yucatán wasn't like Dallas, that Mérida at least was an important city (but so is Dallas, I guess), that there must be writers from there, and I switched my Google searches to google.mx, where indeed I found several lists of writers from the Yucatán, though I turned up nothing (with my still admittedly brief research) that was available in English.

In Mérida, my father and I stopped in at Between the Lines, an English language bookstore. The owner is an ex-pat who has been living in Mérida for 19 years. She opened the store two years ago, just before the onset of the pandemic. My father, who works in publishing, was curious about how the owner sourced her books, so they got to chatting. Then he raised my question: who were the great writers from Yucatán? And did she have any of their books? She didn't believe there were any novels by Yucatecan authors available in English, but she did direct me to some works of fiction that related to the Yucatán, and I decided to buy one of these, Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, from her shop. This book had in fact come up when I was looking for books about the Yucatán before I left for Mexico. I even went to Greenlight Books on President's Day, thinking I might buy a copy if they had it. They had several of Moreno-Garcia's other novels, but not this one. Silvia Moreno-Garcia has been on my radar since the release of Mexican Gothic, which seemed to be everywhere for a bit. Based on what I'd heard, I wasn't particularly interested in Mexican Gothic, but an NPR recommendation of her more recent book – Velvet Was the Night – did leave me interested. 

Gods of Jade and Shadow starts off in a village in Yucatán in 1925, where a young woman who is a poor relation in a rich family accidentally unearths a Maya god of the underworld. It turns out her grandfather helped this god's brother betray and kill him, and he's been stuck in a chest in their family home ever since. The girl and the god travel to Veracruz, Mexico City, El Paso, and Tijuana as they try to return the god to his rightful place. The book is a mix of fantasy and romance, loosely rooted in the Popol Vuh, a Maya mythological text. With its references to Maya mythology and Maya practices, it was fun to read this just after my trip, where we visited several Maya archaeological sites, drove through villages that even today are predominantly Maya and where Maya languages are still spoken, and where – in Mérida – we saw a reenactment of the Maya ballgame pok ta pok, which comes up a couple times in the book. 

This feels like a good time to mention again that it was a planned trip to Mexico that really started my whole world books reading project in 2016. At the time, the only Mexican novel I'd read was Like Water for Chocolate. Since then, I've read at least half a dozen more Mexican novels by several different writers, but I still feel this as a gap in my reading. I think this has less to do with Mexican literature per se and more to do with the fact that, as I expressed it in that original post, it's a big country, right next door, with a lot of shared history with the U.S. In Mérida, I also visited the Librería Dante, a Spanish-language bookstore, and I looked at their shelf of books by Mexican authors (I was very glad they had such a thing). There were the authors I'd read: Carmen Boullosa, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Laura Esquivel. There were the authors I hadn't read, but had heard of: Carlos Fuentes (I've tried reading him 3 times now, but never gotten past page 50), Guadalupe Nettel, Jorge Ibargüengoitia. And then there were the ones I'd never heard of. Maybe one of them was the great writer from the Yucatán I'm looking for.

The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles

It has taken me a long time to get to The Sheltering Sky. I spent many years a little afraid of the book. I knew only the barest outlines of the plot -- that a husband and wife go to Morocco and into the Sahara and terrible events ensue. The events were worse than I imagined.

I don't remember a time before I was aware of The Sheltering Sky. We had a copy at home when I was growing up. It was a different edition; I remember the title was written in an Arabesque font that I found appealing as a kid. I also remember being drawn to the title itself. It seemed to suggest something I almost understood. 

Later, the book took on an even greater apparent significance for me. In the late 1990s, when I was in my early 20s, I spent three months living in Morocco with my then-boyfriend (now ex-husband). I remember contemplating and deciding against reading it before we left. I think I had been (half?) jokingly counseled against reading it at the time. I did read a short story by Paul Bowles somewhere in the weeks before I left the States, but it turned out to be set in Central America. 

The second reason I had avoided reading The Sheltering Sky is also, funnily enough, the reason I own a copy. I have been working for many years, with varying levels of intensity and long stretches of not working at all, on a book loosely based on my time in Morocco with my ex. During the period when I was working on it most diligently – the summer of 2013, when I was unemployed – I got it in my head that I should read The Sheltering Sky and that's when I picked up this copy. But I didn't read it at the time. I was afraid of how it might influence me. 

Recently, for the Mini 1000 I wrote about in my previous post, I went back to writing about Morocco. I suspect eventually what I wrote more recently will merge with what I've written previously, but I decided to start completely fresh and it went really well. It was in the wake of this that I decided I should finally just read The Sheltering Sky and boy am I glad I did. For one thing, it was an incredible book. The last section was really rough – enough that it did cast a bit of a shadow on my enjoyment of the first 80% of the book. But I'm also glad I read it because, without entirely knowing it, I had been in conversation with it. I knew it on some level, but reading the book was a sometimes strange experience because it felt familiar. I have a hard time explaining this. Did I know more about the book than I was consciously aware of? Possibly. When you try to put into words the immensity of the Sahara, and the sense of alienation one experiences there, are there only limited words and analogies available to you? Perhaps. 

At the end of writing about it for a week, I found myself wondering why I've been trying to write about my time in Morocco for so long, and specifically about the time I spent while there at the very western edge of the desert, a few miles from the Algerian border. Is this the strangest place I've ever been? The most remote? The most affecting? Or has writing about it over and over, across a period of years, given it an outsize proportion in my mind? I'm really not sure anymore. 

Last Night in Nuuk, by Niviaq Korneliussen

Last week, I participated in Jami Attenberg's Mini 1000, the winter edition of 1000 words of summer, writing at least 1000 words a day for 6 days. The timing was good, as I had finished American Spy on Sunday and the Mini 1000 started Monday. Mostly, I didn't read during the week while I was writing. When I did, I read essays from Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Yesterday was a weird day and for a while I thought I wasn't going to get my 1000 words. I read the titular essay in the Chee book in the morning, because I wasn't really sure where I was going with my writing and I thought it might help. But when I finished, I still wasn't feeling much like writing. Instead, I went out to run an errand that I thought would take an hour or so. I ended up running into a friend and talking with her for a long time and when I got home it was four hours later. I had planned to go to a movie last night. I had less than two hours before I was supposed to leave, so I sat down at the computer to try and just get the thousand words out, but they wouldn't come. I was tired. I laid down on the couch and read another essay in the Chee book, "The Writing Life" about his experience as a student of Annie Dillard's. That essay included some really great advice, but by that time I had less than an hour before I was supposed to leave for the movie. I decided to stay home instead. I rested some more, and then finally I wrote. I don't think I actually hit the thousand word mark, but I ended the six days with more than 6000 words, so I averaged more than 1000 words a day, which is good enough for me. With that weight off me, I decided I could start a new book. 

It was later in the day then I usually read, but but I was in the mood to read. Last Night in Nuuk was the very last book on my shelves, because it's the book by the youngest author in my collection. (I've read a couple authors who are younger, but no longer have their books.) I'm not sure what prompted me to pull it out yesterday, but I did a count the other day to see how far along I was on my world books reading project. I thought I was around 75 countries, but it turns out I'm somewhere between 80 and 83 depending what you count. (The higher number is if you count Yaa Gyasi toward Ghana; Viet Thanh Nguyen toward Vietnam; and Albert Camus toward Algeria. There are perhaps some other equally uncertain books that I have counted, but the are the ones that stand out for me.) In any case, I realized that I could feasibly reach the 100 country mark this year, possibly even with books I already own. This was a start. 

The book follows five people in their early 20s and is divided into five sections, each told in one of their voices. I read the first section in one sitting yesterday evening and the other four this morning. The book centers around the events of one crazy spring night in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, as the characters navigate love, friendship, sexuality, and identity while getting very, very drunk. Reading this book, one has the sense that Nuuk is a nocturnal place. The characters wander from house parties to bars to clubs to after parties. They go home at 4am then go back out again because the parties are still happening. It's been a long time since I've had a night anything like the one in the book, and reading it didn't make me miss those days. The last section was my favorite, and actually takes place a couple weeks after the fateful night. The character Sara starts her day at 4:30 in the morning because her sister is in labor at the hospital. She goes to be with her sister while she delivers her baby daughter. The entry of a brand new person into her life seems to profoundly change her and watching this transformation was interesting and beautiful.

American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson

Along with My Sister, the Serial Killer, American Spy was the other book I brought with me to Texas thinking it could be a good break, if I wanted one, from The Copenhagen Trilogy. As it turned out, my breaks went the other way: I paused in reading American Spy to read the third book of The Copenhagen Trilogy, then I paused while reading it again to read Affections, and I even paused a third time and started another book that I've not yet finished. It's not that I didn't like American Spy, more that it was not what I was expecting it to be. I think I assumed it would be light reading; something I would pick up and not be able to put down. When I did sit down and read it, I would often read for long stretches, because it is absorbing, but it was darker and more serious than I expected it to be and so I often wasn't in the mood to read it. 

The other thing I struggled with while reading this was that the narrator and protagonist worked for the FBI. It's not just me who struggled with this; she struggles with it herself – trying to explain to the reader (her own young sons, in the frame of the book) why she joined the FBI. That aspect of her character never quite worked for me, on a couple levels. Firstly, because I never quite believed her motivations; and secondly – outside of the narrative itself – I don't really want to read books that are told from the point of view of law enforcement. (I suppose the whole titular American spy should maybe have given me pause to begin with. Why don't I feel this conflicted when reading John le Carré? Is it because they're English?)

Part of me feels that my assessment of this book is unfair. It was not what I expected, and had I read it with different expectations or even just at a different time, I may well have enjoyed it more.