Finished David Benioff's City of Thieves. Surprisingly good, despite the blurb from O, Oprah's Magazine. I'm not even sure why I was reading it--it was there, I had a gift certificate, and it was about Leningrad, is there anything more to say? But it was a nice surprise. Benioff is not a great writer, but he is a good one--the kind of good writer of good, but not great, books that one needs to read more of if one ever hopes to bridge the gap between the epic, Dostoevskian, tomes one prefers to read and wishes to write (but likely never will) and the more pedestrian kind of novel one probably could write if she ever got around to it and/or stopped worrying about failing at the effort. This no doubt sounds stupid, but I worry sometimes that by refusing to read all but the most amazing of prose I'm creating a false standard for myself...one that almost no one ever reaches. Benioff is the kind of young writer who reminds me that it's okay to fall short of the amazingly profound...that the less than amazingly profound can still be pretty darn good.

As advertised, it is a coming of age story, and it is true to the inner nature of what it means for boys to become men (or whatever it says suchlike on the back cover), provided that what it means is to be incredibly obsessed with the inner workings of cock, balls, and GI track. I'm beginning to think that this is not an inaccurate picture, however, not only for troubled boys at boarding school, but for the majority of the male half of the species, so I will not fault Benioff on this assertion. It is also, as advertised, very funny, if you find funny jokes that center around the inner workings of cock, balls, and, well, you get the picture.

If you've been to Leningrad/St. Petersburg, City of Thieves will appeal all the more. I liked the way I could remember my way around the city as Benioff wrote about it, superimposing my twenty-first century images on his WWII descriptions. And I liked how Lev, the first-person narrator's, naivete was transmitted through the narrative. What's this? A log cabin full of plump girls in the midst of a siege? Hmmm...why ever would the Germans leave them alone in the woods like that? You have to feel bad for a generally likable character whose trains of thought keep derailing in such spectacular fashion. My only wish is that he might refrain from musing at such length about these derailings.

My one real problem with the book, though, is that it wrapped up in such an unsatisfying way, by which I do not mean that I'm upset that someone had to die in the end, because that's pretty much a given. A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were watching A Single Man, and he reminded me of Chekhov's adage, "introduce a gun in the first act..." This is true, but it's not a suggestion to use it in the third then press FF until you reach the end. Which is kind of what I feel Benioff let happen in this book. He uses the proverbial gun in the third act, then reaches what is supposed to be the epitome of the emotional arc in the fourth then immediately launches into hyperdrive for a few pages, reaching THE END as neatly as possible, wrapping up all loose ends and teaching the implied author a few choice things about his grandmother, too. It's all too simple, really. And it's unfortunate that it begins with a chess game, because from the moment chess reappears as a theme in the third act, you know exactly how the rest of the book is going to unfold, as neatly as if the moves were plotted out before you on a chess board.

I don't really fault Benioff any of this, however. It's only his second book. And I'm tempted now to go back and read his first.

For now, though, it's on to the Coetzee. Summertime was waiting in my doorway when I got home tonight, so that's for tomorrow. I will be much more exacting with him.