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...problem in this book is that the sparse sentences, minimal descriptions and hesitant confessions which fill The Minus Man add up to virtually nothing. At the end of the book, after 200 pages and several months inside Siegert's head, the reader still remains unfamiliar with his character. We don't know him. He's barely an acquaintance...
Sure, the reader learns that Siegert's father watched him have sex and his mother was an alcoholic, that he thinks his brother was murdered and that he spent time in a mental institute. But that could have been culled from the book jacket, and the text does little more to enlighten us. The reader is left feeling that the work of paging through this novel, the time and the electricity for the light bulb, doesn...
...enter into the mind and life of a figure that one finds both frightening and repulsive in order to understand his motives and his methods. How does the murderer entice and entrap his victims? And, more importantly, why does he kill? McCreary fails to make Siegert intriguing to the reader or explain the killer's mysterious appeal to his prey...
...Minus Man disappoints. What medium is better than a first-person narrative to satisfy the reader's yearning to explore an alien and fascinating persona? Even though the book switches between Siegert's thoughts on events he is in the process of experiencing and imaginations of his eventual confessions, the reader is given few hints as to the essential question of why this person is compelled to kill...
...shorter New Yorker articles, one on the Portuguese-American fishermen of Provincetown, Mass., and the other, the title piece, on an environmentalist who patrols the Hudson River, are well sketched, though they might usefully have been longer. This is solid work in a traditional landscape, and the reader resolves to watch for more...