REVIEW

A welcome reprinting of the third novel by one of the most challenging crime writers around. After the immense promise of his first novel, Box Nine, and a backslide of sorts in the less challenging Wireless, this was the book which demarcated the wide boundaries of O'Connell's writing. If it is not as successful as the brilliant Word Made Flesh that followed it, The Skin Palace merits consideration on its own terms.

The key to the book is the business card of Jakob Kinsky, the son of one of the leading gangsters in Quinsigamond, O'Connell's meta-fictional Worcester, Massachusetts. Jakob wants to be a filmmaker, and his card reads 'Hyperreal noir for our entropic world'. As if to reinforce the point, O'Connell uses a quote from the master of entropy, Thomas Pynchon, to adorn one section of the book. It's as if O'Connell's aim is to find a stasis for all his gangsters, pornographers, artists, and moral crusaders, within his imaginary city's hermetically controlled environment. Paradoxically, O'Connell's best writing is in the personal. Jakob and the other main character, Sylvie, are both searchers, and their mundane inner struggles are what keep the narrative moving as the bodies pile up in the outside world.

In a sense, the difference between this book and Word Made Flesh is that in the latter O'Connell was able to bring the same sort of power to bear on the mechanics of the world itself. It's impossible to write about O'Connell without making comparisons, but I think the one that works best after four novels is to Don DeLillo, who also uses elements of genre fiction, and also seems to follow in some of Pynchon's fictional footsteps. I thought Word Made Flesh was one of the best American novels of the 1990s. If The Skin Palace isn't quite at that level, it's still interesting to see where O'Connell was going, and how he got there.

Michael Carlson