A City Solitary (1985)

I came to this mass market paperback novel by Nicolas Freeling in an unusual way. In the '80s I subscribed to The Armchair Detective, the crime fiction zine, in its Otto Penzler era. At some point it called for volunteer reader reviewers, which I signed on for. I enjoyed getting a handful of free books in the mail, but they were not generally very good and immediately started cutting into precious reading time. Honestly, I don't know how book reviewers do it. Probably the most interesting thing I ever got was Rock Critic Murders by Jesse Sublett, which was not bad hardboiled detective stuff but not up to anything like what I hoped for from the title. And I could never get through A City Solitary until I force-marched it recently. It's short but it's ponderous and self-important. As messes go, it has interesting points, but the key word is still mess. It's basically a stream of consciousness exercise and not many people here are likable. The main guy identifies himself as the last of some aristocratic line. His thoughts roam through European literature for analogies and comparisons. He lives in the country in France. The novel starts with a home invasion. His wife is out and he's home alone. It's three young adults, two men and a woman. They steal some of his stuff—he doesn't have much of value—and also kill his dog. But instead of wanting to bring them to justice, he sympathizes with them, especially the leader, even wanting to protect them. It gets fairly complicated through the murk of the narrative, but finally our guy is on a road trip with the leader, our guy's wife, and his recent new lover. They are attempting to escape to Belgium or the Netherlands. It doesn't make a lot of sense, the pace is slow, and the digressions, often pointless, are continual. When I looked up Freeling's biography it made a little more sense. He wrote this in his 50s but his main thing was crime novels with a continuing detective character named Van der Valk (and another named Henri Castang). It feels like Freeling is just blowing off steam here, branching out with something experimental. Nice try, I guess, but it's just fatally indulgent. At least (and at last!) now I have read it, discharged my duty to The Armchair Detective, and can give it away.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.