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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Karen Pelletier Novel to Date, Jan 13 2004
I read this book when it was below zero, and thought that the title was especially appropriate for a cold January in New England. The source of the quote is even more interesting:"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead." -- Sinclair Lewis Cold and Pure and Very Dead is the fourth volume in Professor Joanne Dobson's series about Professor Karen Pelletier. In Quieter than Sleep, readers first met the professor. Doctor Pelletier found herself pregnant as a teen in high school, and dropped out of her plans to go to Smith to marry her truck driver lover. After a difficult pregnancy and marital abuse, she put her life together to raise her daughter as a single Mom while pursuing her academic career. Finally finding love with a cop in New York, she abandoned him to follow her desire for a career to settle at tony, elite Enfield College in New England. Arriving at Enfield, she became the new kid on the English department block sharing responsibilities for 19th century American literature with an aggressive, pompous womanizer who wanted to discuss more than literature with her. She found herself attracted to all the wrong men, and attracted attention from men she would rather avoid. Ah well, back to those term papers! In The Northbury Papers, the professor has an unusual stroke of luck that makes her career prospects much brighter. In The Raven and the Nightingale, she makes an important literary discovery and explores the nature of originality. The primary appeal of the series is that Professor Dobson has created a memorable character who will resonate with all those who question pretension. Those who liked Quieter than Sleep, The Northbury Papers, or The Raven and the Nightingale will probably like Cold and Pure and Very Dead as well. I recommend reading Quieter than Sleep before this book because the characters and the context won't make as much sense without having read that book first. Otherwise, you may find this book to be an average literary mystery. This book is almost a spoof and reveals a very promising sense of humor by the author that takes full flight in the next book in the series. As the author points out in acknowledgments, this book owes an intellectual debt to Ms. Grace Metalious's Peyton Place and Ms. Jane Tompkin's critical question "but is it any good?" in Sensational Designs. While being interviewed by an easily bored young reporter from the New York Times, Professor Pelletier answers his throw-away final question about what is the greatest book of the 20th century by naming a popular 50's potboiler of small town scandals in New England called Oblivion Falls. Perversely, with this attention the book becomes a best seller again. That fact simply amuses the professor about the quirks of commercial publishing until the reporter ends up dead in the driveway of the author's home. The professor is once again pulled in to help with the "literary" aspects of the mystery, and teams with Lieutenant Charlie Piotrowski to find the killer. In the process, they learn that Oblivion Falls contains clues to an earlier crime and make progress in solving that one as well. Selections from the fictional Oblivion Falls are nicely interspaced through the book in an interesting way to give the book two story lines at different times. This book is for anyone who has ever enjoyed a good romance novel involving scandalous behavior. There are several love stories in the book, and they show the gamut from mere attraction to powerful mutual commitment. As usual in the series, the mystery isn't very hard to solve. The clues are carved as clearly into the text as the faces of the presidents are on Mount Rushmore. If the mystery had been disguised better, I would have rated this book at five stars. As I finished the book, I found myself thinking about what the best measure of writing is: Its immediate impact on others, the number of people who read it or its lasting influence? What do you think?
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