Bar Scene
Christopher Moore's A Killing Smile has been on my stack for two years. I bought it because one of Moore's friends mentioned him. A lousy cover and an unpleasant opening got me off on the wrong foot. At length, I picked it up again.
It turns out to be a fine book, though not the book I expected.
This strangely-conceived, creepy, and moving story about expatriate life in '90s Bangkok hinges on the meeting of old two college friends: a Los Angeles lawyer whose wife has just died, and the man she left to marry him. They meet in a Bangkok joint. They snarl, scheme, and each plots his revenge against a backdrop of bar girls and Mekong whiskey. The story is (or should be) about those bar girls, from whom Moore's attention rarely strays far, but he is reluctant to focus on them; as soon as his prose brings one girl into focus it retreats in terror, as if Moore's text is deeply afraid of commitment. This is a story of men without women, even though women are literally jumping into their laps.