Mystery Girl, by David Gordon

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I loved the first part of David Gordon's The Serialist, but it switched tones in the middle and I ended up not liking it. I thought perhaps Gordon's inexperience building a consistent plot and theme was just a rookie mistake that he corrected with Mystery Girl. Boy, was I wrong. Gordon seems to be opposed to structured plots, on principle. The protagonist of Mystery Girl is a frustrated writer who likes to write dark, stream-of-consciousness, soul-searching novels with no plot and that nobody reads. Unfortunately, this seems to be a description of Gordon's ideal. He ends up writing a mongrel mixture of a commercial mystery with a "literary" modern novel, and he ends up satisfying neither audience.

Mystery Girl has action and mystery, but it isn't structured in a way that makes us care. The protagonist doesn't know what he wants, and as a result the reader doesn't care what happens to him. There's lots of scheming by minor characters and more than a few plot twists, but we just don't care enough to follow all of them and instead we end up focusing on the implausibility of the schemes.

Gordon has excellent style, but little else, and its a shame.