Dennis Haritou: If you are in the business of publishing or bookselling, I suggest you try to get yourself a pre-publication galley of Knopf’s Border Songs by Jim Lynch. Although off to a slow and skeptical start, I am currently past page 100 of this 400 page novel and continuing my reading with a sense of mounting excitement. I am having the experience of reading a potential New York Times bestseller that I actually like. (!) At first I thought: too rural, too Pacific Northwest for my East Coast urban corridor taste and too sentimental. But I am being won over page after seductive page by this story about a dyslexic border patrol agent named, very winningly, Brandon Vanderkool.
The book has a slow fuse…at least so far…and maybe there are one too many descriptions of birds in flight or dairy farms for a city guy like me but I am sticking with it and I don’t think I’m going to be disappointed. I have just taken a liking to Brandon, the big lug, and I want to find out what happens to him. I guess even I need a break from the neurotic New Yorkers and drugged-out Londoners that I have been reading about in the last two novels that I read. After I finish with Border Songs as a welcome break, I’ll be ready to return to my own presto urban planet again. Later on, maybe the Three Guys will tell you what we thought about the whole thing. So my first impressions may be subject to a lot of revision as the whole story arc is grasped. We’ll see. Border Songs will be on-sale in the summer of 2009.
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