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Title: Too "artsy" for this reader!
Review: (And no, I've never read Finnegans Wake either.)e.e. cummings abhored capital letters. Evidently, Kent Haruf thinks it high literary style to eschew quotation marks - or, as Tom Robbins calls them: "earrings." Yes, Mr. Robbins, they are "earrings" when the author wishes to note that something is being called something which it may not be - for example "a good book"- but quotation marks also perform the very useful function of letting the reader know when a character is speaking. This midwestern reader found this book to be too disconcerting - the lack of punctuation impedes the flow - makes one constantly have to "translate" as one is trying to read.Life is too short - and there are too many readable books out there to waste time on this one. I gave up on page 62. It's interesting that, on the jacket where they are trying to sell the book, the publishers know quite well how to use quotation marks!
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