Book Details
| Title: | Fletch Reflected | |
| Author: | Gregory Mcdonald | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 02.02.25 |
Other Books Read By This Author (10)
- Carioca Fletch
- Confess, Fletch
- Fletch
- Fletch and the Man Who
- Fletch and the Widow Bradley
- Fletch Too
- Fletch Won
- Fletch's Fortune
- Fletch's Moxie
- Son of Fletch
| Date Read | Note |
| 02.02.25 | The eleventh and final Fletch book. This one picks up a few days after the events of Son of Fletch with Fletch Jr. (heretofore known in this note as "Jack") finishing up his writing on the neo-nazi thing for a CNN-stand-in, and Fletch Sr. (we'll call him "Fletch") coming back to his baby mama's fat farm which he blew up via expose to take her somewhere to more effectively lose weight. The story mostly sticks with Jack as he enters a rich guy's estate where someone's been trying to kill him, although Fletch joins in towards the end of the book. I found this to be just ok. By now the plot and format devices are so laid bare that each character/suspect basically gets one scene and the ending / reveal played out more or less at random. The character of Jack continues to be a carbon copy of Fletch so scenes where they're together actually, for the first time in the series, gets confusing to tell who's saying what. There's also an odd premise for the rich guy to be rich, in that he invented the "perfect mirror" which doesn't reflect things backward. I suspect there's some literary reason for this but for me it made the world a little different by bending the rules of physics. It reminded me of The Hexagon in Stephenson's DODO book, except that was about time travel to explain it. I didn't expect the last book to be the best or anything, but to me it was pretty clear that Fletch by this point in Mcdonald's career was more of a safety blanket than passion. And here we come to the end of the series. Even in its ups and downs I still liked the series as a whole quite a bit. My feelings on Chevy Chase inhabiting the role have vacillated back and forth. At first I thought he was great casting and I couldn't help but see him in my mind while reading the other books, then I started to feel that Chevy's casual, bumbling, who-what-me nature didn't fit with the character's hyper-intelligence and cool premeditation, but in the end, as the plots drifted away from everything going Fletch's way to Fletch handling wild surprises with unusual calm, I'm back to thinking Chevy's a good fit. Certainly he played Fletch better than Jon Hamm, but if we're really being honest the best stand-in for Fletch would be the author himself. According to the Internet, Fletch's wild divergence to a farm in Tennessee is due to Mcdonald himself moving to a farm in Tenneseee. So it's fitting that the impossibly cool, three-steps-ahead man of ultimate journalistic integrity would for once and always be fantasy-fulfillment for Mcdonald himself. I only have the jacket photo to go from, but he fits the mold. My biggest takeaway from this series goes back to the first book, and that's if the characters' voices are strong you can get a hell of a long way with just dialogue. I always thought that was exclusively the domain of the screen or stage play and that "good" books needed thick, beefy paragraphs full of evocative description, but that first book has none of that, and really the entire series is lean. I think the longest book was 240 pages? And while the prose style did get less extreme, each book is still majority dialogue I think. After all the plot details are gone in my head, I'll remember that. Now for some rankings. I read the books in publication order, but I'll list them out three times anyway: publication order, chronological order, and order of my enjoyment. After that, it's on to something else. I think maybe something non-fiction. Publication: - Fletch (1974) - Confess, Fletch (1976) - Fletch's Fortune (1978) - Fletch and the Widow Bradley (1981) - Fletch's Moxie (1982) - Fletch and the Man Who (1983) - Carioca Fletch (1984) - Fletch Won (1985) - Fletch Too (1986) - Son of Fletch (1993) - Fletch Reflected (1994) Character Chronology - Fletch Won - Fletch Too - Fletch and the Widow Bradley - Fletch - Carioca Fletch - Confess, Fletch - Fletch's Fortune - Fletch's Moxie - Fletch and the Man Who - Son of Fletch - Fletch Reflected My enjoyment - Fletch - Confess, Fletch - Fletch's Fortune - Carioca Fletch - Fletch's Moxie - Fletch Won - Fletch Too - Fletch and the Man Who - Fletch and the Widow Bradley - Son of Fletch - Fletch Reflected |
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