First the movie: Midnight Run. I’ve probably seen this film five times and it always makes me laugh my ass off. This clip has one of my very favorite movie lines of all times. It’s at the very end. Clip is just over a minute — 1:06.

Not that you need to know, but Charles Grogan plays an accountant who unwittingly works for the mob in Chicago. Once he finds out, he steals millions from them and gives it to charity. He’s been indicted and is out on bail.

De Niro plays a former cop, also from Chicago, who left because he was unwilling to take bribes. He now works as a bail bondsman in Los Angeles and has been tasked with bringing Grogan in.

The books: a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait and short stories by George Saunders, Tenth of December.

I finished The Marriage Portrait but found it to be a bit of a slog. I love this writer (this is the fifth book of hers that I’ve read) and I will continue to read her, but here she indulged in too much description of nature and interior moods. It didn’t help that the two time lines made you work a bit to keep track of things.

The NYTimes reviewer agreed with me, although he is much more critical. He wrote, “it … went in for lush atmospherics, for a lot of rustling leaves” and “[m]urder and unwanted sex are primal drivers of narrative … [but] the characters are so one-dimensional and overwrought that the force of neither driver lands.”

It’s strange to come to this conclusion when some of the descriptions that were TOO MUCH were written with gorgeous prose.

It was interesting, by the way, to read a novel that does what I have been criticized of doing. Have I mentioned this before? I like atmospherics and can go on for pages (the light on the river, dusk gathering in the dewberry bushes, etc) leaving the plot (what plot?) to languish. In my third major edit, I searched the word “clouds” in order to strike out more than half of the (endless) descriptions of the sky.

Now Saunders I read because he really knows how to play with form (think: Lincoln in the Bardo). He does so here with a lot of skill, even inventing a grammar for one of his characters (see below). Didn’t love these stories however and that may be a question of preference — the reliance on dystopian plots and details just didn’t grab me. Sometimes I’m a fan of that. Not here.

What were two of the best books you read in 2023?