The Nature of Things

So, this book calls to mind Beckett's Waiting for Godot . It's all about the waiting. Waiting for someone who never comes. The book actually reads more like a play than a novel. Reading it is a bit of a confusing slog at times because of the format. I'm not sure why some modern writers seem to have a prejudice against quotation marks, but apparently, Kevin Barry is one of them. It is not always possible to understand (without digging) just who is speaking and it isn't always clear at first that someone is speaking. In my opinion, that just makes the reading unnecessarily hard work and it annoyed me. Apparently, it didn't annoy the Booker Prize jurors who put it on the long list for this year's award. One can see why I suppose. The language of the novel at times rises to lyrical heights and its two curmudgeonly main characters are interesting. These are the type of male characters that a certain kind of male writer seems to love to write about. Elmore Leonard an...