Slog

(A few times a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today? Salvation Boulevard, by Larry Beinhart.

Where’d you go? Mirch Masala. I was inspired by Dave’s review this week.

What’d you eat? I had the lunch buffet ($7.95.)

How was the food? Delicious! The butter chicken and the paneer curry were my favorites, but the piping-hot naan delivered to the table was great, too. This is by far the best Indian lunch buffet I’ve had in Seattle. But the other options are so depressing I stopped going to Indian lunch buffets quite some time ago.

What does your date say about itself? It’s a thriller by the man who wrote the novel American Hero, which was the basis for Wag the Dog. American Hero was kind of crazy—the author wrote himself into the book, and it was very different from Mamet’s script for Dog, basically claiming that the first Gulf War was a plot to get the first Bush re-elected. If your tolerance for conspiracy theorists is all right, I recommend Hero. This new one is about religion and politics, and it’s more of a legal thriller.

Is there a representative quote? “Manny slammed his fist down on the desk. He was wearing a shirt that cost $300, $350. A $150 tie, wide and straight, pimp my neck. The jacket of his $2,400 suit hung over the back of his chair. The view out his window made it the priciest real estate in the city. Manny loved money, and Manny made money. But here he was, slamming his fist down on the desk so hard his coffee mug took a little hop and clack. “Not if I can fuckin’ help it.”“

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes, but I’m losing patience. I got 39 pages into it and I’m on Chapter 9, and the characters aren’t really characters yet. As with the above quote, they have one attribute (in Manny’s case, love of expensive things.) If I don’t see a little more depth soon, I might abandon ship.