A Crime in the Neighbourhood by Suzanne Berne
Published 2000 · 256 pages · 64,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Crime in the Neighbourhood to read?
A Crime in the Neighbourhood scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- Clear American prose filtered through adult remembering childhood.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Controlled sentences with retrospective meditation.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of guilt, perception, and suburban darkness.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Watergate-era detail and family drama efficiently interwoven.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Adult narrator reconstructing childhood understanding and guilt.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The crime, Nixon, the neighborhood carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Distance between child perception and adult understanding creates irony.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Truth about crime remains uncertain; guilt is complex.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Retrospective narration with layered time.
How A Crime in the Neighbourhood is regarded
A Crime in the Neighbourhood holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.