Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday June 18, 2010
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HOUSE OF SECRETS
Richard Hawke
Random House
ISBN 978 1 4000 6608 7
351 pages
$25
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
There are two things to be said about Richard Hawke's political thriller, "House of Secrets." First, it is quite well written; Hawke produces graceful sentences, nice descriptions, a fast pace and a good deal of suspense. Second, his story is lurid, sordid and largely implausible. Still, in his defense, let us note that it concerns a prominent political figure's affair with a young woman and that in real life those things often seem lurid, sordid and largely implausible -- it's hard to believe that the men could be so damned stupid. So what's the bottom line? I confess that in time I surrendered to Hawke's skillful storytelling even as I noted that much of his plot was way, way over the top.
Andy Foster, a young U.S. senator from New York, is handsome, smart, articulate, blessed with a lovely wife and daughter, and clearly a man with presidential prospects. However, early in the novel, he ventures to a beach house owned by an attractive young publicist who helped manage his last campaign. Soon the two are happily making whoopee, unaware that a hidden camera is recording their fun. Even worse, a huge psychopath with an iron pipe breaks into the bedroom, kills the woman and leaves the senator bleeding and unconscious. On awakening, he flees, unaware that both the lovemaking and the murder have been transmitted to Dimitri, a drunken Russian thug who has been monitoring the show from a nearby motel.
Meanwhile, back at the White House, a new Democratic president has taken office and is angered by leaks charging improper business dealings by his vice president, who clearly has to go. A search begins for a successor, and Senator Andy is high on the list, but only because no one knows that he has just witnessed the murder of his mistress and is receiving calls from a drunken Russian demanding money. We meet the senator's loving wife, Christine, whose frustrations with her husband's political career almost cause her to fall in bed with a handsome sculptor who sells her cupcakes in a bakery. We also meet Christine's father, an ex-governor and one-time presidential hopeful himself, who still dreams of being a kingmaker.
The nutcase who killed the mistress has kidnapped Senator Andy's adorable 7-year-old daughter, because he doesn't think Andy is a fit dad. At the same time, other bodies are dropping right and left. We also meet Christine's mother, the ex-wife of the state's scheming governor, who proves to be the ex-wife from hell -- the lady has a sharp tongue -- but her ex-husband is proving not to be such a prize himself. As the maneuvering for the vice presidency continues, various secrets emerge. The ex-wife from hell has some surprises to relate about her sexual adventures in her younger days. The nutcase has a mother as crazy as he is. Senator Andy confesses to previous affairs, including one with a newspaper reporter and another with an aggressive saleswoman in a Georgetown jewelry store.
Amid all this gore and duplicity, the reader soldiers on. We wonder if the kidnapped daughter will be saved. After two cops are gunned down by the psycho, we fear for a female officer we've come to like. Most of all, we wonder if Senator Andy -- who, despite his indiscretions, remains the most likable of the politicians we've met -- can possibly survive this mess and become vice president. Or should he? And we wonder if his marriage can survive -- because, despite everything, he and Christine do love each other and are brought back together by the ordeal of the kidnapping.
The novel's most dubious leap has Andy being groomed not just for the vice presidency but the highest office itself. Still, Hawke (the pen name of Tim Cockey) has an unsentimental view of politics and some nice lines on the subject: "The Republicans smelled blood, and on the Sunday talk shows the thirstiest of them showed off their gleaming incisors." "In the world Andy moved in, mere suspicion spelled total calamity." The president asks, "How many eons do you suppose it is going to take before the best and the brightest finally stop also being the stupidest?" Ultimately, "House of Secrets" is what George Orwell liked to call a good-bad book. You can label it slick entertainment or high-grade trash. One reader might think it absurd and another praise it as great fun. Both could be right.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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DAY FOR NIGHT
Frederick Reiken
Reagan Arthur
ISBN 978 0 316 07756 9
326 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Julie Orringer, the author of "How to Breathe Underwater," a collection of short stories, and the recently published novel "The Invisible Bridge"
Frederick Reiken's complicated and absorbing third novel, "Day for Night," opens as though it were a far more conventional book: On a trip to Florida in 1984, Beverly Rabinowitz, her boyfriend and his son go on a manatee-watching expedition; Tim Birdsey, their young guide, makes an unexpectedly deep connection with Beverly, and he brings her back to the river at night. The play of moonlight on the water makes her think of taking similar walks with her father, whom she hasn't seen since she was a child, and who is rumored to have died at the hands of Nazis in Lithuania in 1941.
After this setup, we expect the novel to follow Beverly home from Florida. We expect to learn more about David, her boyfriend, who is in remission from leukemia, and about his son, Jordan. We expect to learn about Beverly's own children -- two teenage girls who make a brief and compelling appearance by telephone in this first chapter -- and about Beverly's lost father.
And we do, eventually, though not at all in the ways we expect. The novel's second chapter leaves Beverly behind entirely. Instead, we find ourselves with Tim, the tour guide, who's on a plane with his talented band mate Dee. The two are en route to see her comatose younger brother in Utah. Within a few paragraphs, Reiken involves us entirely in this new narrative, making us wonder about the relationship between Tim and Dee, about what led to the motorcycle crash that landed Dee's brother in a coma and about the trauma Dee and her brother experienced when they were children and that threatens to reemerge now.
Perhaps because the movement from one character's story to another is so unusual and abrupt, the novelist feels compelled to tip his hand: Thinking about a song Dee wrote recently, Tim muses, "What it's about is the idea that we're much closer than we think to the random people we see on any given day, that everyone in this world carves out a little groove and that although you may think your world is large you rarely venture outside this groove."
It's an ordinary-enough idea, that our individual point of view is necessarily limited and that we're linked in unknowable ways to the people around us. But to a novelist, the idea poses a delicious challenge: Can a satisfying and cohesive narrative be constructed from many disparate points of view? Can the linkages between those separate stories be made to feel both organic and artfully shaped? How far afield can the individual stories run while remaining connected to the central narrative arc?
In the hands of a lesser writer, such a challenge might lead to disaster. But in "Day for Night," Reiken creates a fascinating, emotionally acute and, at times, mind-bogglingly complex story to which we surrender with delight. Using a different first-person point of view in every section, the novel shifts from Tim to an FBI agent investigating Katherine Clay Goldman, the mysterious and supernaturally elusive woman who sat next to Tim and Dee on the plane; then to Jennifer, Beverly's precocious teenage daughter; then to a puppeteer-turned-neuroscientist who was smitten with Goldman in San Francisco during the Summer of Love; and from there to a series of distinct and memorable characters, each with a fascinating tale and each with an essential role in the larger narrative. Like a master puppeteer himself, Reiken inhabits every one of these characters completely and invests each with an independent life.
As its title suggests, "Day for Night" is a novel concerned with paradoxes, and with the human ability to hold conflicting ideas in the mind simultaneously. In the film technique to which the title refers, a cinematographer achieves the appearance of nighttime by applying the appropriate filters to daytime footage. We never fully lose our awareness of the day-ness of the scene, but because many other clues suggest night, our minds participate in the illusion. In a similar way, Reiken explores our desire to make sense of what appears at first not to make sense, or to understand what seems at first unknowable; he also examines the ways in which sense falls short, the places where the inexplicable must remain unexplained. "The human brain must make a narrative," the neuroscientist tells us. "This I can say with certainty, and yet each narrative we choose will reach a point at which it no longer suffices."
As the novel draws toward its climax, it focuses more directly upon a question that contains many unknowables: What really happened to Beverly's father in 1941? Did he, in fact, perish at the hands of a Nazi death squad, or is he one of the two Jews rumored to have escaped? Those questions and the unexpected answers that emerge acknowledge the difficulty of knowing anything for certain, particularly when it comes to that horrific period of history during which so many stories were lost. But Reiken also suggests that through our complicated interconnectedness, we may be able to arrive at some clearer picture of the truth, and that while every narrative is, to some extent, a fantasy, a kind of wishful thinking, miracles of insight and connection do occur.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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I WAS BORN THIS WAY: A Gay Preacher's Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ
Archbishop Carl Bean with David Bitz
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978 1 4165 9282 2
264 pages
$24
Reviewed by Justin Moyer
During the heyday of disco, it's doubtful that every majestically coiffed, leisure-suited, tightly slacked gentleman dancing to Carl Bean's 1977 hit "I Was Born This Way" recognized the song as an early homo-positive nightclub anthem. Still, three decades later, the oft-remixed track still has the power to get people's feet moving, if not ensure the legality of same-sex civil unions. "The song became an anthem of liberation for everyone," Bean writes in his entertaining, if thinly researched autobiography. "It was Holy Ghost power, prompting me, pushing me on."
Though Bean didn't write the song, its infectious hook -- "I'm happy, I'm carefree and I'm gay" -- synthesized the attitude he needed to overcome a brutal childhood marred by sex abuse and a short-lived career as a gospel singer that devolved into wilderness years of poverty and homelessness. Eventually, this queer black boy from Baltimore reinvented himself as an AIDS activist and the founder of the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church. "While suffering, these people asked for my hand," Bean writes of his AIDS ministry, one of the first to reach out to HIV-positive minorities sidelined by their churches' homophobia. "These encounters showed me the transcendence of the divine." The Village People's "YMCA" might get more airplay, but Bean doesn't need a construction worker outfit to build a moving narrative.
Justin Moyer can be reached at moyerj(at)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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