Diverging Streams

Carlson writes in a discursive, deliberately old-fashioned mode — mock-Victorian narratorial asides, sesame-seed digressions on the mathematics of seconds elapsed since Agamemnon, a full paragraph on Mondrian and the composition of a barroom's paint job. It's a voice with real personality, closer to Twain or Saroyan (both explicitly acknowledged) than to anything marketed as science fiction today, and when it works — as in the extended set piece of Haskell's spittoon humiliation — the comic timing has genuine control. The line "Let no man suggest that it was panic that brought Haskell fully to his feet" earns its laugh through pacing, not just diction.

The strongest sustained writing is the Bobcat Crossing sequence: the aurora borealis passage, the frozen river, the near-drowning. Carlson slows down and lets the cold do the work — "the sound of brakes applied in panic on an ice-covered roadway is low and liquid" is a genuinely earned image, precise and physically true. The command of small-town 1950s Minnesota — Old Spice, the passion pit under the footbridge, Vaughn Monroe on the record player — gives the book a lived-in regional texture that few writers bother to render this specifically.

Where it falters: the narrator's habit of over-explaining every joke and every emotional beat (the extended treatise on cruelty and group psychology, the physiology lecture on prostate fluid) undercuts the comic and romantic momentum it otherwise earns. Dialogue is serviceable period pastiche rather than distinctive voice. This excerpt gives no visible science-fiction premise yet — it reads as historical/coming-of-age fiction so far — which is a marketability concern for a book shelved in SF. But the prose has a real, idiosyncratic hand behind it, and that's rarer than it should be.