Its faux-concerned, confessional tone tricks the reader into seeing it as a friendly, supportive space in which your every question is answered, including those that it had never occurred to you to ask, because they're farcical or they give you palpitations.
Linda's work is popular, as this novel will be, because it plays a big fat trick on the reader on its final page, delivering a detail that changes virtually everything else about the story.
Every piece of foreign correspondence involves a bit of conjuring; when performed well, the trick transports the reader to a place she may have never visited, acquaints her with people she has never met, and puts her inside a story she perhaps never knew existed.
These are not easy poems, but they don't play tricks on the reader, either.
And there, after Mr. Patterson has played a few tricks on the reader, she meets Matt.
And Ms. Atkinson enjoys keeping them that way, much as she delights in playing sly little tricks on the reader.
It has been praised for its political vision as well as for Didion's original style, "more suited to New Journalism than fiction", according to Kirkus Reviews, in which the narrator identifies herself as Didion ("Call me the author") and plays numerous tricks on the reader.
Bourne has studied enough of these things to get the form right - that annoying and flattering trick of keeping the reader occasionally behind and then ahead of the story, the compelling kick at chapters' close, the taut interlock of strands as the novel develops.
In particular he looks at the way in which she uses lengthy and elaborate similes as a means of obfuscation rather than elucidation; a linguistic trick that allows the reader to physically experience the narrator's feelings of detachment and abstraction.
It's a reverse-helix trick that answers the reader's inevitable question: "Wait, is she just whining because she got dumped first?
