Border Town Blood Book

I picked this up because it looked like a fast read and because the reviews on the back were unusually laudatory. It was fast, but it didn't move me at all. I laughed a few times. The death scenes were almost startling. The conceit is that the book is a failed preacher's journal from frontier times. It deals with his mundane life, his humorous lust and alcoholism, and the era's conflict between the white settlers and the Native Americans. The death scenes were impressive, the more I think of it. They made you feel dismay at the suffering a character has endured, but you never had a real feeling for any of the characters other than the narrator and the local lunatic, Johnny Appleseed. I will admit I could have read it slower and kept a ledger of who each character was--I did this for Malamud, after all--but the form of the book invited distraction for the reader. I could have tried harder, but at least to a partial degree, my wandering focus is due to the novel's form--inventive and fully realized as it is. If the reader came to care about the characters and/or if the author found a way to make his characters more distinguishable from one another, their deaths would have had a more lasting impact. Nisseson's journalistic renderings of the murders pack quite a punch but are ultimately lost because you can't keep track of which person he's writing about. Oh and the ending is bittersweet; it's effective. Suddenly. So. Yeah, I read it because the reviews made it sound just about profound, and that's what I'm after at the moment. But it didn't deliver. I wasn't the most attentive reader, but an author has to earn that by the time the novel's first half is done. That's when I expire.