Jim Thompson, �The Kill-Off�
It wasn�t all that long ago when I declared I had found the standard mode of stylistics for Jim Thompson novels:
Soon after, Thompson switched his theme. And now, with The Kill-Off, Thompson has switched his stylistics as well. Goddamn it, don�t you know Americans need consistency?
Not that the style has really changed all that much. There�s still a murder, there�s still a lot of shady characters, and there�s still a shock ending. But Thompson usually takes a first person narrative. This time he makes a first person narrative from 12 different narrators, each allowed to tell their version of events. A nice literary trick to be sure, but I�m not convinced Thompson pulled it off. There�s not enough crossover here, and it often took too long to figure out where each character fit into the entire picture.
And so, when the surprise ending comes about, there�s no real pay-off, because we don�t have anything vested in the characters. What we�re left with is a marveling of the mechanics, but we�re uninterested with the story itself.
Kinda like the last Star Wars movie.
