Pathology

Just read Kathy Reichs' latest, Monday Mourning: A Novel. This series isn't bad, though there is something curiously unsatisfactory about the protagonist (particularly compared to the Kay Scarpetta of the early Cornwell novels). And the mannerism of writing in very short paragraphs becomes rather grating! It's a lesson to me, since I always end up breaking up everything I write (fiction, that is) into ridiculously short paragraphs--there is something very artificial and old-fashioned about the long paragraph, I often feel. (The kind that Monica Ali and Alan Hollinghurst write, I mean; they're both wonderful prose stylists but it's as if, oh, Rothko had painted paintings that were indistinguishable in colors and brushstrokes etc from a nineteenth-century painter like Ingres.)