His fragments read like full sentences that got chopped at the middle point and sometimes comprehensible only on the third reading but even then not always. Sentence fragments are abundant, and that can be fine-some writers know how to use them well-but Wright wasn’t one of them. The writing style is just too strange, though. There’s a definite introspective tone to this book, and it seems obvious Wright was aiming for a literary fiction thriller. That’s really too bad because if he’d ditched Susan’s section altogether and spent time fully realizing Nocturnal Animals, this could be something worth reading. It’s as if Wright felt a straight-up thriller wouldn’t be impressive enough and therefore decided upon the story-within-a-story structure. There’s no connection between what occurs in Susan’s world and in the world of Nocturnal Animals-or at least, it’s too vague, in which case it’s as good as no connection at all.

What’s unclear is why Wright felt it necessary to construct his narrative this way. This isn’t to say Nocturnal Animals is good, just that it’s slightly less terrible. Nocturnal Animals is more engaging than Susan’s section but not by much. It’s through Susan that the reader learns about Nocturnal Animals’s main character, Tony, and the most nightmarish time of his life. She’s reading a manuscript, Nocturnal Animals, a story her ex-husband wrote. It concerns the Susan of the title and focuses on her domestic life, with soporific flashbacks to her flawed first marriage and musings on the problems in her current marriage.

It’s a discombobulated, terrible something-or-other.Īustin Wright structured Tony and Susan as a story within a story. It’s not a mystery or literary fiction either. Bookstores and libraries can shelve it as a thriller, and Saul Bellow can endorse it by calling it “a story of blood and revenge,” but it’s not thrilling.

Tony and susan book