conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Some Great Thing about Struthers, McGuinty, Part with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Canadian writer the author's <I>Some Great Thing</I> demonstrates much promise but shows a bit of the raggedness to be expected from an ambitious debut effort. the author spends nearly a quarter of the book slowly introducing his interpretation of Ottawa, experimenting with first- and third-person narration, and framing the lives of his two protagonists, Simon Struthers and Jerry McGuinty. McGuinty is an ambitious developer with a passion for plaster and for the lunch truck cook, Kathleen Herlihy. Struthers, a man crippled by the reputation of his famous father, is a civil servant in the National Capital Division. Only at the end of Part Two (of Six) do Struthers and McGuinty meet, and Part Three begins the real unfolding of the story. Some readers will have abandoned the author long before, during his explorations of the corrupt process for getting small business loans or in his fragmented presentation of Struthers's sexual appetites. They may also stumble over the author's occasional lapses into pseudo-poetry, placed in the mouths of working-class characters ("...I will tell you about a line like 'S' and the taste of the milk of lost hope.")