Wire to Wire
by Scott Sparling
Tin House Books, 2011
392 pages / $15.95 Buy from Tin House Books
Rating: 9.5

America is too diverse and American culture too fast evolving to produce A Great American Novel. I do believe, though, in an Essential American Shelf, as long as it needs to be to hold all the voices that speak artfully, truthfully and with compassion about their chosen hunk of psycho-social real estate. Scott Sparling’s Wire to Wire claims a place on my personal instance of that shelf, snugged up somewhere between William Kennedy and Charles Bukowski, between Theodore Dreiser and Flannery O’Connor, rubbing elbows with the best of the noir detectives and assorted snotty 1980s boy nihilists.

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