When a friend, who recently moved to Sante Fe, offered to let me have her (signed) copy of James Conaway's
Nose to read I jumped at the chance. I'd heard it was a tale of wine and mystery, so what wouldn't there be in this book for me to like? Sigh. I really wanted to like this novel, I really did. I have read two other James Conaway books;
Napa: The Story of an American Eden and
The Far Side of Eden enjoying them both (save for a bit of gratuitous gossiping). However, those two books were works of non-fiction and, if
Nose is anything to go by, non-fiction is the genre that Mr. Conaway should stick to.
Nose is a relatively quick-read, the story is set in the fictional, San Francisco Bay Area, wine-centric town of Caterina (a very thinly disguised Napa). The cast of characters is more or less predictable; the
nouveau riche developer who'll stop at nothing to make a killing in the wine industry; the tree-hugging, earth-muffin winemaker with a conscience; the good-living and overly influential wine critic (incidentally the most interesting character, but not for long); and the young, new-comer journalist who is going to expose them all - for good and for bad. Yeah, again, sigh.
This book held such promise. But for me the story was somewhat unstructured and the prose often ponderous. Character development was poor (please, fleetingly meet Esme) and contradictory statements/occurrences abound (well, two glaring ones at least,
e.g. pp 241-244, the stacked washer-dryer - it's
stacked, one shouldn't be able to, erm,
sit on it!). What this book really needed was an editor. Apparently, the book did have an editor, but I can only assume that she must have been drinking on the job. (
Copernicus, maybe? Just joking.) Now I'm no grammarian (although I am the self-proclaimed queen of the dangling modifier), but that's alright because I'm not writing a book for publication and sale. If I was writing a book I would definitely employ an editor who recognised my weaknesses and who would be subsequently tasked with correcting my grammatical crimes.
Anyway, enough of all that. The deal is that this book was given to me with the express request that it'd be passed on to someone else when I had finished reading it. So who wants it next? All qualifying requests (in the comment section) will be put into one of the Vinodog's bowls for a drawing. Good luck.
