Blogs Don't Burn

Warren is clearly out to impress with this novel, and mostly he does so, unfortunately at the cost of that evasive final stretch of insightfulness and humanity that separates the very good from the great: the feather in the cap of any novel that aims to be especially rewarding for dealing with the very subject of greatness. Warren’s goal of drawing a great man, the individuals in orbit around him, and the importance of his deeds are so obvious from the outset that every new development in character and situation lacks a real disarming sense of revelation. Warren seems so infatuated with the respectability and the importance of his subject matter that he seems to hold his characters at arm’s length taking out a  great deal of the troubling closeness to the character’s flaws that is so essential to his thematic preoccupations of the blood and dirt out of which great accomplishments are built.