Reviewed by: Keith Nixon
Genre: Noir
Approximate word count: 60,000-65,000 words
Availability
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on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
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Author:
Ron Dionne
is 52 and lives in Chappaqua. He has previously had a number of short stories
published in magazines.
Description:
Jingo
Dalhousie is a troubled wannabe musician who works as a janitor in his cousin’s
New York jazz club. He finds his unusual name in a highly successful debut
novel and feels driven to track the author down and discover why. However, the
author has a secret she’s desperate to keep.
Appraisal:
Sad Jingo opens with the protagonist, Jingo
Dalhousie, being given a book that, mysteriously, has his name in it. Jingo
cannot understand why and decides to track down debut author, Diana Medeiros.
By night, he works as a janitor in a club surrounded by jazz musicians,
something he aspires to be. The club is owned by his cousin, Harold. By day, he
lives in a small flat, attempting to write and play music.
Jingo first
goes to Diana’s publishers and then to a signing. There is a huge queue to see
Diana, the book is a smash hit. Jingo finally gets to the front and questions
her. Diana has no idea who he is and Jingo gets thrown out of the store without
any answers. It’s worth saying that to reach this point in the plot I had to
plough through 25% of the book – 15,000 words…
The focus
then shifts to Diana. We learn she used to be a patient at a mental hospital
and perhaps she knew Jingo there? But she cannot remember. Jingo for his own
part continues to be obsessed with Diana. He appears at a reading and has a
brief conversation with her before being beaten up by a guard and ends up in
hospital.
Despite
Diana’s reservations, she meets Jingo again and he plays for her in the club,
the one time he manages to string together a decent piece of music. But Harold
loses control of the business and Jingo is out of a job.
As Diana
gets closer to Jingo (primarily because her problem mirrors his) she begins to
admit her terrible secret is catching up with her.
If the
above sounds a less than exciting summary, I apologise but there was little to
get animated about in Sad Jingo. Where
to begin? Well, there’s a mass of bland characters, some described, some not
(it took me several thousand words to realise Jingo is a man in his sixties, well
I think he is). Many of these
featureless characters have ridiculous names which are used repeatedly, and
often in full, instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ making the reading a challenge. Jingo
and Diana take turns in engaging in long periods of introspective internal
dialogue supposedly to help us understand them better. However, this meant it
took 25% of the book to achieve three key activities, as I mentioned.
In the
early chapters there’s excessive use of punctuation interrupting what little
plot flow there is (I was shocked to read an acknowledgement to a copy editor).
Some paragraphs are a page or more long and the formatting is not great.
There are
other problems – past and present tense are mixed together in the same
paragraph on several occasions. The dialogue is often white noise and generally
meaningless, dull and barely moves the tale along, like listening to clucking
hens. Sentences are regularly horribly mangled with repeated usage of the same
word – just two examples comprise:
‘…author of
a book about her book but had not read the book.’
‘…what’s
wrong with that, what’s wrong with that Harold, tell me a single thing that’s
wrong with that?’
In the
final chapter Jingo learns Diana has killed herself and, after 62,000 words, I
felt like following her…
FYI:
Infrequent
strong language.
Format/Typo Issues:
Several
formatting issues and typos. Many punctuation problems.
Rating: * One star
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