I’ve been meaning to post all week, but have been brow-deep in a revision of the next novel, which will probably take another week or so. It’s going well–most of it needs little touch-up–but the opening 100 pages need some very selective weeding, which is never an easy thing to do.

Anyway, my point is that I’ve been remiss, not bringing up some great attention the book has been getting over the week.

Over in the Seattle Times, Adam Woog gave it a quick mention, calling The Tourist “intelligent, evocative, and nuanced.”

I see that I didn’t bring it up here, but the indominable Ms. Weinman has had The Tourist up as one of her Picks of the Week for…well, for about a week. Says she: “The book thrills, but Steinhauer takes care to keep the reader thinking and contemplating about the actions, often brutal, that are to come. This deserves all the advance hype and the audience that is sure to expand with publication.”

But the most in-depth piece of the week has come from Kevin Holtsberry. As he admits from the outset, he’s a fan of my fiction (something I’ve appreciated ever since the first one came out–thank you, Kevin), and very quickly he echoed one of my own fears:

New is exciting but what happens when the author leaves a much loved series behind and starts a new project?  Sure, it is still what I like to call a literary thriller, but what if Steinhauer stumbled on his first stand alone?  Made me a little nervous, I will admit.

He wasn’t the only nervous one. The pre-pub publicity was daunting even for me. My publisher listing Le Carre, Greene and Deighton on the covers. And, of course, the George Clooney thing.

But despite all this, Kevin did like it:

The Tourist is a great and thought provoking read for anyone who enjoys the thriller aspects of the espionage genre but prefers better – and more philosophical – writing than your average airport pick up.

I quote at length because, despite his initial reaction to reading it a while ago, I still wondered how it would stand up to a second read. So by quoting so much I’m telling you how slowly and carefully I read his review, and how important it was to me that someone who “got” my earlier novels be happy to come along on this new project.

But what I particularly like about Kevin’s reviews is that they fixate less on plot than on that amorphous thing called theme. When a reader is already in tune with your storytelling, then he has the freedom to set all that aside an find out the “why” of the story–that is, why is it being told, and why should it even be told in the first place?

I don’t mean “message”–I don’t write messages into my books. Those are things I put in letters or essays. What I mean is that Kevin is able to sit back and see what questions are being brought up, answered and then contradicted; he sees what things are being examined.

And as far as I can tell he’s pretty much gotten it right. I say “as far as I can tell” because, while I know those themes lay between The Tourist‘s covers, if you had sat me down and asked me, “What’s your book about, thematically?” I would have shrugged and begun to stutter, wanting to sound intelligent but failing miserably.

For example, when discussing the next book with my agent, she said, “I think it’s wonderful how you’re examining the act of belief–how every single character is defined by his belief.” I paused and said, “Oh…am I?” I’m sure she’s right, but it came as news to me. The same thing happened with Liberation Movements–my editor had to spell out for me the central theme of my own book for me!

Which is another reason I love a meaty review like Kevin’s–it often tells me things I didn’t know. But those things are no less true for my ignorance.

Check it out here–it’s a great piece.

I’d hoped for a few more newspaper reviews, but this is looking like it’ll be a slower burn than I (and my agent and publisher) had hoped. This Sunday’s full-page review in the New York Times Book Review will hopefully spur more reviewers into action.

Some of you will have already seen this Sunday’s piece by Marilyn Stasio (for the rest of you, it should be online in a few hours), and Kevin has already posted a review of the review here. I saw it myself on Monday (I think with any review this lengthy the publisher gets a copy early), and while it’s certainly not the rave I would have liked, its size and prominance should do great things for sales. As for the issues Ms. Stasio brings up, as Kevin points out in his rebuttal, they were nearly all things I’d done on purpose and was quite pleased with–so what can you do?

Posted Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 12:02 am under Literature, Ourselves, Publishing Business. Follow responses via the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback. Both comments and pings are currently closed.