I finished Capote's In Cold Blood. It got fairly boring for me at the end. I'm not big into courtroom stuff, especially when I know the outcome. Perhaps it would have better if it wasn't a true story, so there would be a question. I also think Capote just handled the chase much better than the capture and trial. I think he was more interested in that aspect than the bringing of justice.
I listened to Half-Moon Street by Paul Theroux. It is actually two novellas in one book. The titular first one just annoyed me. The main character was a PhD candidate, and also a whore. She wasn't a very good student. She ended up giving a paper presentation on "research" she did while having sex with Middle Eastern men, because she was too lazy to do any actual research. Her pompous pseudo-intellectual banter was annoying. She looked down on the other whores for how stupid they were, but she was only educated, not smart. She made a point of memorizing her men's license plates in case something happened. And then? What good is that knowledge going to do you if you are locked in a closet or dead. She thought she was being smart and protecting herself. That is just one instance of her utter stupidity. She thinks she is being empowered by turning these powerful men into goo. She also fucks anything else that moves. It isn't about gaining power over powerful men, as she says, it's about fucking. She sucks off the plumber as payment for fixing her pipes. She has sex with a cabbie instead of paying him a couple pound fair. At the end, she almost died. She apparently was sleeping with a person involved in nefarious doings. The apartment had been bugged and she got more information out of the guy that they had ever hoped to get. I kind of hoped she would die. She reminded me of many of the grad students I knew from U of M.
The next novella was actually pretty good. It was the story of two twins. They had a splitting of ways and had not seen each other for 30 years. The twin of the main character shows up at his house unannounced one day. The main character goes off for the weekend, telling his brother that he better be gone by the time he gets home. He comes back to find his brother dead. He buries his brother in the town dump, and tires to find out if the man was really his brother, or some imposter sent by his brother. The reader gets a sense that there really is no way it was not his brother, but it helps to set up the main character's mental state. The guy finds out his brother was a doctor, and then that he was really a quack. This was actually an interesting story with a pretty good ending, so I won't ruin that for you.
I also read Updike's Trust Me. It is vintage Updike. A personal style makes the stories interesting. I do find his subject matter gets a little stale. That is one reason I like spec-fic. I like something strange to happen in an otherwise normal setting. Too much of post-Joyce fiction is trying to prove that any life/situation can be interesting if very well-written. This isn't always the case. No matter how well written, it will still read like a chapter about whales (Melville), or a chapter about 1,147 ships, who was on them, and what their grandparents did (Homer).
My novel is coming along now. I'm revamping Huelen's back story, which I only decided to do at the deadline. I really need to start thinking of these major plot issues before the deadline hits. I seem to get my best ideas right at the deadline. Perhaps if I trick myself that the deadline is a week or two earlier, I could get that kind of stuff done ahead of time for the submission. Even with the rewrites, the first draft should be done for the June residency. I will be glad when that's done, but I know because of the way I wrote it, I will have extensive revisions. I would really like to have those done by July, so I can have some other people read and critique it. It has been a long, painful process. I thought it wouldn't be much more difficult than my screenplay, but I was wrong.