The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

I think the biggest driver of how I felt about The Boy Detective is that it's billed as being the autobiographical story of a man who was an (imaginary) detective as a kid, and I wanted to read the heck out of that book. Bad news: After I read The Boy Detective, I still want to read the heck out of that book, but this isn't it.

Instead, The Boy Detective is the meandering musings of Roger Rosenblatt as he reflects back on his life. It's not really about anything, per se, and previous reviews that have referred to it as a series of essays are erroneous: it is more snippets of thoughts, half-poems, and imaginary situations. The idea is that Rosenblatt is literally going on a walk and allowing his mind to wander, as it does. At times, this is kind of fun – at his best, Rosenblatt has a lot of interesting and insightful things to say about the interiority of the self, the persistence of the childhood self (for him, exemplified by the Detective), how perception of self changes with age and autobiographical writing. He has some less interesting thoughts about his family and New York City in general. Some of the vignettes are simultaneously beyond bizarre and droll such as a hypothetical conversation with Hitler. Overall, because of the choppy and disjointed organization, I found reading the book to be more of a chore than anything else. Some of the paragraphs harken back to earlier passages, so its best enjoyed in longer sittings. Had I not read it on vacation, I'm not sure I would have found it readable. The saving grace is that even in the boring parts, Rosenblatt is a master of language and I found his English so lyrical that it compensates for the content.

I still really want to read that other, nonexistent book, though.