Seven American Nights

Peter Cash · 13 Aug 1997, 15:05 · from urth-v0004.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Peter Cash <cash at rsn.hp.com>
Subject: (urth) Seven American Nights
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 15:05:50
Message-ID: <urth-v0004-0232 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0004/0232.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

Finished Seven American Nights last night. I've decided that for Wolfe,
plot is a kind of opiate that he introduces into his stories to keep you
hooked until the end--when it turns out that the plot doesn't matter at
all. This story is a good instance: in the end, the possibility is
raised that the entire story is a fake, written by the investigator to
inveigle the boy's mother into giving him more money to carry on the
"investigation". Thus, the very foundation of the story is undermined.

But if the story is counterfeit, why did the investigator write such an
unpalatable one? Surely if his purpose was to extract money, he could
have written something a bit more up-beat, something that the mother
(and the lovely Jasmine) would _want_ to believe.=20

The actress' deformity (sorry, the book is at home and I have no memory
for names) was pretty much a cliche'--you could see it coming. Still, it
was well-handled. (One wonders--what kind of deformity is so gross as to
cause our hero's drastic reaction, but cannot be discovered by touch
while the two were making love?)

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net