Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nicholson constructs the book as a series of vignettes that ricochet between various times and modes of exposition--several scenes are unveiled as journal entries--but that all converge on London. Not surprisingly, the city becomes the novel's catchall metaphor, and therein lies the book's essential problem: to complete the metaphor, the characters get stitched rather awkwardly into the narrative, as if merely to cover holes in its fabric, and the clumsiness of their insertion detracts from the clever manipulations of Nicholson's plot...
...opening pages: "It's not just a metaphor. Look at me. Don't I remind you of anything?... It doesn't need a genius to see what's going on. Greater London, c'est moi." Fittingly, the city will be the meeting place between Judy and the novel's hero-oid, Mick...
Though the story requires one or two leaps of faith along the way, its orchestration is undeniably remarkable. Nicholson begins, cloudily, in medias res, and labors throughout the middle of the novel to thread his scenes together. He presents his readers with a scene and then, subtly, shows how it came to be. The early appearance of Stuart's diary, for example, is explained by a later scene wherein his wife snoops through his desk and alights on a computer disk. His non-linear development echoes the innovation of the cubist painters as it fragments, abstracts and reconfigures the narrative...
...plot is hardly a consolation when the scenes on which it depends can hardly command a modicum of even vague interest from readers. True, the novel's pages bleed together, but Bleeding London is a wounded creature. A writer once said of Ezra Pound, "he is a great poet who has never written a great poem." In the world of lyric prose, Nicholson neither leads nor follows. Rather, he occupies that awkward region in between--usually above reproach, seldom awe-inspiring--where many decent writers languish in anonymity. Bleeding London is, well, bloody awful...
...James Albert Michener was an orphan, adopted from the Bucks County, Pa. poorhouse by Mabel Michener, a Quaker widow. From there to Swarthmore, to the Navy, and then to Japan, making a hometown - and a novel - of every place he stopped. "Tales of the South Pacific" was his first, born of his Navy days and published in 1947, when Michener was 40. It won the Pulitzer Prize, was set to music, and became immortal...