Last month, I reported that I had read The Dean's List and that I was not sufficiently impressed to enroll myself in the John Hassler fan club. But inasmuch as Hassler had been so celebrated upon his death, and I felt negligent, I thought it only fair to give him a second try. Now I've done so: I've read The Staggerford Flood (2002). It's a congenial satire that concerns itself with an aging group of small-town Minnesota Catholics. It's intermittently witty, but either too subtle or too fey for me. Hassler has been praised as a great regionalist, but in my view can't hold a candle to the upper New York state chronicles of Richard Russo and isn't even in the same league with the inventive and often very beautiful Baltimore novels of Anne Tyler.
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