Um, yeah. No. ( )

The best of Harry's novels. ( )

This is not one of Crew's best novels, but it is somewhat of a transitional novel between his witty and hard-hitting early works and his more "love-filled" (hey! that's not me; it's the New York Times!) works. This is the first of his "second generation" of novels, as it were. Duffy Deter, Marvela, Tump, and Jerq are plastic versions of earlier roles, and it almost seems that Harry was doing something he did when he first began to write. He often says he took a Graham Greene novel and rewrote it, using other names and clauses to meet his structure. "It didn't work well," he said. Well, maybe he tried that manner of writing for this tome, and it doesn't work all that well, either. Don't get me wrong. At his worst, he is good. ( )