This book had me feeling like a crazy person. I had an awful time reading it, especially disliking its prose. What gets to me is that what partially convinced me to give the book a shot was that the prose was being praised in a lot of reviews I've seen about it.

Now, I should probably give some context: I usually don't read crime novels and I especially don't read noir. I never cared much for that genre in movies and TV and so never sought it out in written form. However, I figured I might give the literary genre a shot with Five Decembers, as it came highly recommended from multiple reviewers that I respect.

I should also point out that I did not finish this novel. I dropped it 25% in, after around 110 out of its 432 pages. So I won't be judging its narrative (not that I usually am all that interested in talking about narratives, anyways).

The Characters

I understand that crime noir stories tend to have broody, morally gray, and emotionally distanced male leads. This is one of the reasons I've tended to avoid this genre. However, I was pleasantly surprised with McGrady. While he still felt much like an overly competent male power fantasy to me, his character is significantly richer than that. For one, he is, in contrast to his colleagues, open to other cultures. He feels like the kind of guy that actively seeks out new knowledge and experiences. Additionally, he actually appears to have emotion, showing quite a bit of compassion to his partner Ball and apparently actually respecting his girlfriend, not forcing himself onto her.

However, that's where my praise for the characters in this book (up to where I got) stops. The only other people properly characterized are extremely unlikable men that perfectly hit my crime noir stereotypes. Abusive, xenophobic, manipulative, corrupt, disgusting. I'm not doubting this is by accident, as it highlights our protagonist's strengths and follows genre traditions, but I still didn't find this particularly interesting, given how overplayed these stereotypes, especially in police forces, are.

The Structure

Probably another staple of crime noir novels: homogeneously sized, very short chapters. Now, I'm not saying that short chapters are in and of themselves a bad thing. However, the chapter length felt forced here, to the point that it took me out of it.

Usually, you would think of chapters as a logical breaking point of the narrative; a spot for the reader to stop and take a break without losing too much context. However, in Five Decembers, the structure of the chapters seems to be informed, first and foremost, by length. I read this on my eReader, so I got a prediction of how long a chapter would take me to read, and basically every single one clocked in at ten minutes. The longest one, and quite the outlier, was at about fifteen.

Again, not necessarily a bad thing, if it wasn't for the fact that the chapter breaks sometimes occur in the middle of the scene. An especially egregious example of this is the switch from chapter three to four. At the end of the third chapter, reinforcements just appeared and McGrady started talking to them and gives a run-down of the situation to the officers. It ends basically in the middle of their conversation, when he starts to give them further instructions.

Most other times, they are a bit more natural than that, but still feel superfluous. There are actually quite a lot of scene and time changes within each chapter, denoted with three asterisks. Any of these are just as consequential as the chapter breaks, which leads me, again, to believe that the chapters were just inserted when enough text was accumulated, preferring these kinds of small breaks or resorting to a hard cut if need be.

Again, this could be the author making fun of genre traditions by following them excessively. But even so, I never felt like it ever added anything to the novel; quite the opposite in fact.

The Prose

While the points above were pretty annoying to me, the prose is what drove me absolutely insane, especially given that so many people have praised it. I suppose I can't claim it isn't effective – I immediately felt like I was in a black-and-white movie, with cigarette-smoke filled rooms and a voice-over from the brooding male lead. Nevertheless, I hated reading it.

The best way I can describe the prose is as brutal: The form of written text is butchered to the point where most sentences have eight or fewer words in them. The descriptions are sterile and lifeless. Few things that don't necessarily need a description get to have one.

Now, I am no stranger to functional prose that focuses on telling a story, rather than impressing with the beauty of the form. However, I don't think I've ever seen prose this sparse. I am a pretty slow reader, almost vocalizing the text I read in my head, and I had to start kind of squinting at the text, trying to ignore the overwhelming amount of periods. Otherwise, I would get a jumble of sentence fragments that didn't make much sense.

While not the worst instance I came across, below is an example of what I'm talking about, from the first paragraph of chapter four. To me, this prose doesn't flow at all; it feels choppy and clumsy. I could see this being effective during action scenes, where this kind of structure can create a fast-paced, hectic feeling, but this is not that.

They huddled in front of Kondo’s car. Six patrol cops, two men from the coroner’s office, and McGrady. He didn’t know anyone but the old sergeant, and that was fine with him. They wouldn’t start second-guessing his experience. Which was essentially zero, for a thing like this. He gave them the score. He was going to play it safe and slow. Two of the patrolmen were going to uncuff Miguel from the back of McGrady’s car, and take him downtown to sleep it off in a cell. Two more were going to drive down to the end of the valley. One guy would get out and stand guard at the valley entrance, and the second would drive up to Faithful’s house to borrow the phone. They needed tow trucks. That would leave McGrady and Kondo and the coroner’s men on the scene.

What almost made me reconsider my stance on this was the fact that this style of prose seems to be primarily present during the "detective" sections. There's a longer scene in chapter twelve, where our protagonist invites his partner to his girlfriend's Thanksgiving dinner, that was much more pleasant to read. However, on further inspection, I think this has more to do with the fact that there is a lot of dialogue here, which makes the simple sentence structure more natural. However, I would be remiss to not admit that I really liked this section:

After Fred Ball called it a night, they stood on the front porch together and watched him go to his car. He gave a salute from his open window, knocked over the trashcans across the street while backing out, and headed off down the valley to the sound of dogs howling.

While I am repeating myself at this point, I again want to admit that this may well be intentional. From what I understand, crime noir novels, and pulp fiction more generally, strongly value simple language and structure to allow the reader to get to the "story" as easily as possible. Five Decembers' prose sometimes feel like the author simplifying to the point of ridiculousness. However, I again fail to see how this actually adds to the novel; since there is barely any contrast, it just made the reading experience repetitive to me.

The Repetitions

What finally got me to drop Five Decembers was that it didn't just start feeling repetitive in form, it also started repeating its descriptions. It felt like the author was convinced that the reader must have no memory of events that occurred more than two chapters ago,

Here is an example: There are quite a few scenes with McGrady and his asshole boss, Beamer, so it is established early on that Beamer only lives off three things – Luckies cigarettes, Benzedrine inhalers, and coffee. In addition to the author noting frequently how he is consuming one of those substances, we even get inner monologue of McGrady literally noting that. At some point, we also see Beamer getting a head wound. So at this point, we have a pretty clear picture of the guy, at least when it comes to those superficial aspects of his character. Which is why I felt crazy when we get this description in chapter 14:

His [Beamer's] desk lamp was lighting up his ashtray, which was overflowing. There was a pack of Luckies, a Benzedrine inhaler, and a flask of coffee on the desk. There was also a copy of the morning’s Advertiser. When they sat down, he turned it around.

And a few sentences later:

Beamer sucked on his cigarette. He leaned forward, into the light. He was sporting a huge purple knot on his forehead.

None of this needed to be said. And this time, I find it difficult to construe a way in which this may be intentional and subversive, actually. It's just distracting and insulting.

Summary

You probably noticed that most of my critiques of Five Decembers could be chalked up to its (possibly sarcastic) adherence to genre traditions. As such, I suspect that fans of the genre may get way more out of it than I ever will. Five Decembers may even be a masterpiece that I am simply too ignorant to recognize.

At least it is now clear to me that I should stay far away from this genre.