Sometimes a skill that works well in one area, or art, is not as suited for another. That's my working thesis as to why Pete Hamill's 2003 novel Forever is not as good as some of his shorter fiction, such as the brilliant stories in his terrific collection Tokyo Sketches.

Don't get me wrong. It's certainly not a bad novel. It's a good one. Quite a good one, in its best moments. But, it could have been a great one. What is missing from the book is the tautness of reportorial writing — the quality that Hamill has mastered in both short fiction and in his years of pumping out news stories for all the local New York newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, The New Yorker, and Newsday.

What Forever has too much of is pointless melodrama, which is a drag on an otherwise engaging narrative. Yes, the book, at 608 pages (hardcover) is too long, by about 50%, but most of that 200 or so page excess is all melodrama, and the buildup to it. A good editor could have judiciously pruned many repetitious scenes, cut superfluous digressions, and compressed 250 or so pages to between 10 and 20.

The book's first couple of hundred pages, which describe its main character's childhood, and loss of both parents, is excellent. It is set in Ireland and reminds one of the start of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes -- save for being two centuries earlier. It also has some commonalities with Martin Scorsese's film Gangs Of New York, in that one does not picture a gay, green Erin, but a grimy, sweat-soaked, hard-scrabble existence. One almost feels a kinship with Jacob Riis's How The Other Half Lives- but the rural version. The rich details of the early part of the book are also evocative of the magisterial prose in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.

Then, things take a turn for the melodramatic — with wanton murder, bloodlust, an Excalibur-like sword, and voodoo-like beliefs from African shamans. The rest of the book is a solid read, but it never matches the book's start. And this is not due to the magical realism that allows Cormac O'Connor to live several centuries, and not even for the book's unfortunate dip into the waters of the in vogue 'Mystical Negro' trope (when mystical micks could have sufficed — such as the enigmatic Mary Morrigan character), nor even the largely ahistoric posit of the book — that indentured Irish and slave blacks in 18th Century New York were somehow economic and political allies.

No, the culprit that retards Forever's ascent into the pantheon is simply melodrama. Whenever the book seems ready to click into a higher zone, take off into something special that could be read with zeal a hundred years from now, melodrama bullishly intrudes- be it a mythic ride on his horse named Thunder, or the final scenes of Cormac showing mercy on a descendant of the man who killed his parents, and then reneging on his desire to die, once he's found the love of his centuries old life- a young Dominican woman, Delfina Citron.