These <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11serial-t.html”>installments</a> post earlier than you might suspect.
I Wonder What Happens Next . . .
12 thoughts on “I Wonder What Happens Next . . .”
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SPOILER ALERT
I believe this adheres to the Chekhovian principle: “If there is a chamber pot in the first act, etc. etc.” . . . ” Although, perhaps it’s more correct to say is that there’s a high-strung Italian greyhound in the first act . . .”
Some future graduate student is going to get a great dissertation out of urination themes in the Tess Monaghan novels.
To paraphrase Dorothy of Wizard of Oz -
Such a student would have to be a wiz, if ever a wiz there was
Last Chapter. Not for two weeks. Not for two weeks. Not for two weeks. Not for two weeks. Not for two weeks. Not for two weeks…………………It ain’t fair.
Great chapter, Laura. Thanks.
Capture by hounds!
Love it.
What an interesting plot twist. Who would
have thought?
Kathy D.
Is doing this serialization making you feel Dickensian? I think he would have likes Whitney and Epstein praying in the graveyard a lot.
Well, Hardly Knew Her was nominated last year (and lost)!
Still, I’m thrilled and won’t pretend to be blase about it.
Off topic but–many congrats on the “Scratch a Woman” Edgar nomination! (“Hardly Knew Her” is my personal favorite but the entire collection is excellent and one of them certainly deserves to win.)
Say – a Baltimore comment: watching the Obama-Biden presidential train journey from Philly through Wilmington and Baltimore today (especially Baltimore) put a lump in my throat and made my eyes go a little blurry.
Good God – what wonderful stuff! And – C-SPAN allows you to savor the moments themselves, when the nattering on the cable news networks gets too much. You can hear the chants and murmurs from the very large crowds, and essentially join them…
only without enduring the COLD!
When the governor of Maryland asked the very large crowd in Baltimore “How are you?” – I swear the massed answer that boomed back was “COLD!!” – but the gov pressed on with his remarks, and missed a great opportunity for a laugh!
Anyway – superb stuff! A very proud day for the United States of America, and we’re still 3 days away from the Big Day!
15. It’s up, people.
I’m going to relish every word. Here I go…
A Memory Project question:
So, I read and very much enjoyed To the Power of Three (which also caught my lovely wife’s eye, and she expressed interest in reading it, and it is now next in line for her) – and somewhere in the middle of that drama there was a turn that immediately struck me as oddly familiar, and then it HIT me!…and I have a question:
Is there an intentional parallel between the short story Babysitter’s Code, or is the parallel unintentional?
I ask because, in all honesty, I didn’t “get” Babysitter’s Code when I read it last month, whereas a very (very) similar set of characters and subset of events in To the Power of Three is prelude to the central tragedy within that book. (and indeed – pardon my ignorance! As a still-new Lippman reader, this may well be commonly understood by the more seasoned ones of you….I suppose it may well also argue in favor of reading the books sequentially, since come to think of it, the Babysitter’s Code story is echoing To the Power of Three, whereas to me it was the other way around!)
Brian,
To the Power of Three grew out of The Babysitter’s Code. The story is, in some ways, more of a character sketch. I had been asked to write a story for Plots With Guns and I kept trying to write a story about a sad, much tormented girl who brings a gun to school. But it didn’t feel right and I didn’t want to fall into the “Mean Girl” mania of that time. Most of the girls I knew fell in the middle: Sometimes they tortured, sometimes they were torturers.
So Terri becomes Perri and some other things change.