Uncivil Seasons, A Great American Novel

Michael Malone, like so many smart, academically-gifted novelists, is good only for one shot. Caleb Carr comes to mind. If you have read any of the novels after that first blinding flash of talent, you will know what I mean. Uncivil Seasons is a fantastic American novel. In and of itself worthy of being given all of the kudos given to the all the works of the vastly over-rated Michael Chabon. Malone's subsequent work, however, like Carr's, is pathetic, with the general feel of something forced and fraudulent.

Uncivil Seasons is about a murder in a small North Carolina city. It's a Southern epic written in the format of a murder mystery. Malone constructs sentences like no other contemporary American writer, little tornadoes of wit and learning that demand to be read twice, they are that good. His characters are vivid and jump from the pages and speak their words to you, scenes are acted out before you. The whole novel is so precisely, lucidly written that reading it is like watching the movie adaptation of it.

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