A wonderfully irritating book. Very well written but it does tend to drag in the middle section. Both a rite-of-passage and a campus novel and far more tragic than most examples of either genre. At times it is very dark and at other times it borders on the weird. However, the characters are finely drawn and with few saving graces. Most of the time one is sympathetic towards the narrator but rarely empathetic, and there were instances when I felt like kicking him up his backside. I think that reducing its length by a third, from 600 down to 400 pages, would be an improvement. The dissolute students who seem to work very hard on their Greek yet lack any personal ambition are a curious bunch who drift, Gatsby-like, through the story until the aberration of the murder changes all their lives. Then they wake up to the immensity of their crime and a wonderful tension begins, heats to boiling point and then explodes in a way the reader could not possibly predict. This is so carefully crafted that you immediately understand how this book got its status as a modern classic. Overall, this is an impressive book which I have no hesitation in recommending to readers who have a degree of stamina and I assure them that their persistence will be repaid, tenfold.
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