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What I'm Reading

 The TV writer Ed Zwick has a memoir coming out, and he says, "It's never possible for a script to be *too* funny." The older I get, the more I accept this. Writers without a sense of humor make me tired.


Also, though you maybe shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you *can* judge a book by its title. Michael Cunningham's title "Day" seems vague and lazy; the book also seems vague and lazy. The title "Swamp Monsters" seems fun and irreverent; the book itself, a life story of Ron DeSantis, also seems fun and irreverent.

This brings me to "Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone." Here's the setup. A scholar of crime stories, Ernie, witnesses a murder; he sees his brother killing an apparently random victim. But the brother gets out of jail after an absurdly short three years. Now, the family is gathering at a ski lodge, for a kind of reunion. Of course, corpses begin to pile up.

Ernie must find the murderer (who may be a member of his own family). As he investigates, he gives us snapshots of his relatives, who are all (amazingly) killers. Inevitably, Ernie's understanding of a relative's life proves to be wrong, and the killing is something different from what he imagined. As Ernie corrects his own understanding of his family's behavior, he shifts various pieces to begin to complete a puzzle; somehow, the identity of the killer, and the *true* story of Ernie's compatriots, will be braided together.

Because Ernie is a student of crime stories, he points out certain tropes (the mysterious phone call, the confrontation in the library, the ominous predictions about bad weather) as they pop up. I agree with Maureen Corrigan that the writer, Benjamin Stevenson, is graceful enough to ensure that his "meta" moments are not distracting.

I'm a fan of this book.
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