God Save The Child by Robert B. ParkerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the second Spenser book. Spenser meets the love of his life, Susan Silverman in this novel. It is interesting to compare a more impulsive, more sarcastic (if that were possible), and perhaps less reflective, less seasoned Spenser. I've read several of them and I have to say that I think this is the most violent. I was never quite able to figure out why Parker had a PhD in the literature of violence, when I never found most of his books nearly as violent as Patterson or J.A. Jance. The thing about the violence in this book is that it pretty much all centers around one climactic fist fight- which was fascinating. I've never read a description of a boxing match. Interesting new filter for me, in that one of my professors at the Iowa Writing Project had crossed paths with Parker and characterized him as aloof, bitter toward academia, and a chauvinist who uses characters like Susan and Hawk to validate Spenser and thereby excuse Parker's own prejudices. Be that as it may, she assured me that she continued to enjoy his writing. It may be that Parker is a man's writer and Spenser is an anachronistic antihero like Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, but it's just hard to dislike them. Maybe there's a boyish charm like Harrison Ford and Tom Seleck, so that no matter how immature or un-evolved that they are, you just can't help but gravitate to their charisma. It would take an outrageous demonstration of ass-holiness like Mel Gibson's recent ones for Parker and Spenser to fall from our good graces.
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Vikto Frankl says that Murder Mysteries are like drugs. The puzzle of solving the mystery and the action and violence are like getting intoxicated, to escape our mundane, meaningless lives. He says that all the murders, whether intragal to the plot or collateral are a form of narcotization, numbing us against the reality of our own mortality. I say, right on!!!