John Banville - The Blue Guitar (Viking, 2015) *

I forced myself to read till page 30. Then I decided that time was too precious to keep reading. The narrator is a kind of loser, complaining in a self-mockery kind of tone about his fate, which is of course due to his own fault. Is he interesting? No. Did anything special happen? No. Is it funny? No. Is it well written? No, because the narrator is too self-contained, too pleased with his own wit and choice of words. So I stopped.

But please read his other novels. Read The Book of Evidence, or The Sea. He is an excellent writer, only not everything can be a success.