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Feb. 1st, 2006 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupI am really not sure I can finish the book I'm reading, Patricia Cornwell's "Portrait" of Jack the Ripper, in which she purports to solve the case and points the finger at a killer. I'm halfway through it and I've lost any respect I had for her ability to coherently support a thesis (which, okay, was none since I've never read her work before, but still).
I mean, I want to finish it so that I can do a really thorough review, and because she has some Theories that she hasn't yet trotted out, but I'm halfway through the book and tired of reading fallacy after fallacy. I mean, I hung in there with her half-baked suppositions and incredibly long-odds circumstancial evidence because (so she said in chapter one) she had DNA proof that Walter Sickert is Jack the Ripper. Okay, I said, I can accept the rest of your theories if you have DNA to back it up.
But, um, her DNA proof....well, isn't. If anything, the DNA evidence she has proves that Whistler -- yes, that Whistler -- is Jack the Ripper. Of course, she buries the actual evidentiary discussion in the middle of a chapter, about 160 pages into the book.
It is often said that every journalist has one good novel in them, and it should stay there. I think the reverse is also true -- novelists, by and large, should not write nonfiction unless they've done a lot of it. You can assert a thesis by writing a story, but you can't prove a thesis the same way you write a story -- or at any rate, you can't prove it to me.
Bad Patricia Cornwell. No biscuit.
I mean, I want to finish it so that I can do a really thorough review, and because she has some Theories that she hasn't yet trotted out, but I'm halfway through the book and tired of reading fallacy after fallacy. I mean, I hung in there with her half-baked suppositions and incredibly long-odds circumstancial evidence because (so she said in chapter one) she had DNA proof that Walter Sickert is Jack the Ripper. Okay, I said, I can accept the rest of your theories if you have DNA to back it up.
But, um, her DNA proof....well, isn't. If anything, the DNA evidence she has proves that Whistler -- yes, that Whistler -- is Jack the Ripper. Of course, she buries the actual evidentiary discussion in the middle of a chapter, about 160 pages into the book.
It is often said that every journalist has one good novel in them, and it should stay there. I think the reverse is also true -- novelists, by and large, should not write nonfiction unless they've done a lot of it. You can assert a thesis by writing a story, but you can't prove a thesis the same way you write a story -- or at any rate, you can't prove it to me.
Bad Patricia Cornwell. No biscuit.
