Book Review: The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

A little-known, twice-divorced lawyer who works out of his car defends a real-estate agent accused of murder and learns life lessons in L.A. in Michael Connelly's "legal thriller" The Lincoln Lawyer.

Who's Afraid of Punctuation?

From the little I've read, contemporary novels seem to work with a limited punctual pallette. It's mostly commas and periods, with quotation marks for marking off speech, to which all question marks are confined, and the occasional apostrophe-in-contraction. Colons, semi-colons, dashes, and parentheses are slowly dying off. In fashion, however, are periods that appear to want to take the rightful place of every dot, tick, and line they can lay their little one-dimensional hands on, as well as all the resulting sentence fragments.

Take this punctuation and fragment phenomenon into account, as well as an increasing reliance on short, simple words and sentences, and novels threaten to become screenplays. They are something more of elaborate plans than pieces of writing meant to be consumed for pleasure's or art's sake. Even the most hardened screenwriters will often distinguish between the art of writing and the craft of screenwriting. But, with less and less money in writing and more and more money in screenwriting, perhaps polymedia writers like Michael Crichton, Michael Connelly and Dan Brown are simply adapting to a more important market; instead of writing a novel and then slaving to adapt it into a screenplay, they're giving everyone a break and simply adapting non-existent screenplays into novels.

“Thanks, Danny boy!” Akiva Goldsman.

The Lincoln Lawyer is a great example of this type of screenplay-novel. It comes equipped with a standard plot that has all the right twists and turns, and at the right times, a manageable set of core characters, and some easily-spotted themes that will be fun to agree on for the ride home. As a piece of writing, it is an extreme version of anti-punctuation and — though I very much hope not — a sign of books to come.

I ♥ Semicolons

The semicolon is my favourite piece of punctuation; I tend to mis-use and abuse it. In Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer, the semicolon appears an anemic three times. The novel is 528 pages long; this review is — up to these dashes — about a page long. There are now as many semicolons in this review as there are in Connelly's novel.

Let's read some books and do some math. Here's a list of words per semicolon in a selection of well-known novels:

• 42333 – The Lincoln Lawyer (Connelly)
• 4900 – Fight Club (Palahniuk)
• 3711 – The Da Vinci Code (Brown)
• 2534 – Requiem for a Dream (Selby)
• 1881 – Illium (Simmons)
• 1224 – The Godfather (Puzo)
• 1109 – Childhood's End (Clarke)
• 1060 – Chronicles of Pern (McCaffrey)
• 1054 – For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
• 748 – Snow Crash (Stephenson)
• 747 – Neuromancer (Gibson)
• 686 – The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
• 638 – Carrie (King)
• 554 – Contact (Sagan)
• 539 – Animal Farm (Orwell)
• 515 – Middlesex (Eugenides)
• 426 – To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
• 323 – White Teeth (Smith)
• 233 – Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)
• 214 – The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow)
• 184 – The Fountainhead (Rand)
• 182 – A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
• 166 – Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner)
• 142 – Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
• 135 – On the Road (Kerouac)
• 71 – Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
• 69 – Orlando (Woolf)
• 63 – Midnight's Children (Rushdie)

Article Author: Pacze Moj

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