In "Under the Net" there's a great idea, that there are places to live that are in the swing of things and there are places that are not. Philadelphia is not very much in the swing. You don't move here in order to plug in and be part of what's going on in the larger world, the way you would move to New York. You move to NY as much for the feeling of being switched on as you do for any actual job or opportunity. What's prompting these thoughts is a woman from the office who's moving to Boston, which just seems so much more alive and cogent as a city than Philadelphia does, though the two are similar in some ways. Boston is her fantasy city. I'm not sure if Philly is anybody's fantasy city, besides M. Night Shyamalan.

Just finished two novels in bound ms that I'm FedExing back to the publisher this afternoon. They're very good and had a million post-spell-check typos. "Suck" for "such" or "sec" for "sex," and a million times, "on" for "one." As usual I wonder where the edits -- and the books -- are going to go after I read them. I know that sometimes the work I do on these mss, when I work in pen on paper, is input by someone who may or may not be text-oriented, who may not know editing symbols. I have a few questions about the author's intent -- is this a typo or an unorthodox but correct word choice? These queries may not be made to the author, because time is tight; someone may just make a call, right or wrong, and let it fly. I also know that my corrections, when entered by someone else into the page layout, will cause other mistakes to appear, no matter how careful they are. It's just the law of editing and publishing. I can't think of another field in which so many people work solely to rid some product of errors, and never succeed. It's almost reassuring to me that this was a super-rush job, though it sucks for the author, whose works got such lickety-split treatment. One thing I learned early on is that second editions, as rarely as they're published, even more rarely get their typos corrected.



I really want these books to look good. I think they're very special. The tragedy of them is that they could be easily typecast as genre books, but the quality of the writing is so far above the kind of writing you usually see in genre books. I find them more human and thoughtful than James Ellroy, up to now my benchmark for modern, noirish mystery. They don't go for the cheap rush. But they're also not the inwardly chuckling self-reflexive kind of writing you see in upscale mysteries (often packaged around Italian themes). I think they're right for this publishing house, even though the house doesn't do genre books. The writing is so generous and beautifully paced. (Something else that will make them a tough sell; reviewers don't usually get a chance to sink into the pace of a book, or to try to quantify what makes a book alive as opposed to what makes a book "correct.") There are a few characters that I really see; others that I think are intentionally opaque and impossible to know. The mark of a good book, I guess, is the word "intentionally." I think this writer really worked on these books and made every choice consciously. I was psyched to read them and felt different afterwards, not tired but more alive.