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There is some interesting Hilary Mantel backlash right now.

Mantel famously wrote "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies"--and won two Booker Prizes--and all the world has waited anxiously for "The Mirror and the Light."

Some critics love "The Mirror and the Light," and a few do not. The NY Times said it was painfully slow. In the New Yorker, merry iconoclast Daniel Mendelsohn actually said, "Mantel reported all she needed to get out in the first two volumes." (Yikes!)

Even some of the warm reviews teasingly mention moments of boredom--and my heart stops when I see these paragraphs.

(I borrowed the book and skipped right to the end, which people label "BEST PART." Spoiler: As Cromwell marches to his death, he thinks, Others have managed, and I can, too. In his very final moment, he is searching for any available light. I liked that.)

In happier times, Mantel said, "I state what the character SAID, and I state what he DID. I don't have a great deal of time for a character's introspection."

(I like this very much; the reader should be able to infer interior life. It's there in the gap between a character's statements and actual deeds. I like minimalism.)

It seems, now, Mantel has failed her own test: People say there is too much remembering, too much daydreaming, too much interior debate in the new book.

By contrast, Donna Leon is a writer who never dwells too long, too needlessly, inside her characters' heads. Leon--a favorite of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's family, and a favorite of Ursula Le Guin's--writes smart mysteries sent in Venice. The new one, "Trace Elements," has Inspector Brunetti sniffing out a possible murder involving a motorcycle, and also there's an effort to locate two pickpockets who have accosted the mayor's wife, in La Serenissima, a "crime-free city."

Leon makes it look easy. No long bouts with exposition. No pausing to flashback; no thirteen-page scenes in which very little happens. Brisk, funny, understated. The lady is a pro.

That's what is on my reading mind this week.
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