Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday August 6, 2010
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STILL MISSING
Chevy Stevens
St. Martins's
ISBN 978 0 312 59567 8
342 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
Chevy Stevens' "Still Missing" is a sometimes lurid, mostly readable novel that will probably make a great deal of money. Her publisher thinks so, and ordered a first printing of 150,000, exceptional for a first novel. There is a good reason for the publisher's optimism: The book's ripped-from-the-headlines subject -- a young woman's abduction, long captivity and repeated rape -- is blatantly commercial. The irony is that the story becomes more interesting after she escapes.
The captive woman is hardly a new subject in fiction. In William Faulkner's 1931 novel, "Sanctuary," a Mississippi coed is seized by a creep called Popeye and subjected to one of the most bizarre rapes in literary history. Countless variations on the theme followed. James Patterson weighed in a few years ago with a nasty little number called "Kiss the Girls," in which yet another nutcase kidnapped coeds. Patterson even managed to outdo Faulkner in the grotesque rape category, but I won't ruin your morning with specifics.
As a novelist, Chevy Stevens is closer to Patterson than to Faulkner, but her book is not without interest. Her heroine, Annie O'Sullivan, is a petite, single, potty-mouthed, 32-year-old real estate agent on Vancouver Island. One Sunday, when she's showing a house, a man overpowers her and takes her to the isolated mountaintop cabin where she will remain his prisoner for a year.
Her captor (whom she privately calls The Freak) imposes various demeaning rules she must follow -- including specific times when she can use the toilet -- to avoid being beaten or denied food. He demands sex, of course, which she loathes but endures: "He was pretty basic in the sex department," she says. "I did whatever it took to get it over with fast and I got damn good at it." To keep her captor happy, she talks about her childhood and reads to him.
Although she hates him, at some point the Stockholm syndrome kicks in, and she admits finding him "interesting and articulate." She adds, "How could I ever tell anyone he made me laugh?"
At times, Stevens almost seems to be giving us a sardonic portrait of how some women are said to feel about their marriages: "Well, the sex is awful and he's a control freak and a jerk -- but sometimes he's kinda sweet." Still, when Annie sees a chance to escape, she takes it. We know this from the outset because Annie's story is told through her sessions with the psychiatrist who is helping her recover from the ordeal.
Early in the novel, I wondered if its intended audience was mostly men, because, let's face it, men are more likely to rush out and buy a rape fantasy than women.
But soon the sex is played down, and the novel becomes the story of a woman trying to overcome extreme trauma. She no sooner escapes The Freak than she finds herself in the clutches of police, doctors and psychiatrists. When the shrinks are debating whether she's sane enough to go home, she realizes, "I didn't have any more freedom than I'd had on the mountain." Even when she's home, she must deal with her hard-drinking, troublesome mother and the rest of her dysfunctional family, as well as with her unhappy dog, her clueless boyfriend and a BFF who wants to help but won't shut up.
Stevens tries hard to involve us in Annie's suffering; the problem is that although we sympathize with Annie, she's not a very interesting person. The strength of the novel lies not in its characters or insights but in a shrewdly calculated, suspenseful plot that uncorks one surprise after another. In time, Annie even suspects that The Freak didn't kidnap her at random but may have been acting on behalf of someone close to her. The story's ending is admirably dark.
My main objection to the novel is its gratuitous profanity. I am far from a prude (ask anyone), but even in this world of dirty talk I think there are words we'd rather not have to wallow in when we're curled up at home with a book.
Alas, Stevens just can't get enough of one four-letter-world beginning with "s" and another beginning with "f." Weary of this onslaught, at page 259 I started circling those words and found that Stevens used the s-word 35 times and the f-word 28 times before the book ended 81 pages later. Is this deluge supposed to make us think Annie is hip or cool or sophisticated? Do Stevens and her editors think this stuff (a synonym they should have considered) sells books? Not to me.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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RED HOOK ROAD
Ayelet Waldman
Doubleday
ISBN 978 0 385 51786 7
343 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. His e-mail address is charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
One of my favorite Joyce Carol Oates novels -- "The Falls" -- opens with the groom drowning a few hours after his wedding night. Now, Ayelet Waldman cuts the honeymoon even shorter: In her new novel, "Red Hook Road," the groom and the bride die in a traffic accident between the church and the reception. Anyone hoping to push this grim sub-genre further will have to slay the newlyweds at the altar. But whereas Oates uses that nuptial tragedy for her own weird brand of macabre comedy, Waldman sometimes seems engaged in an act of emotional masochism. It's hard to look away, even when you can smell the burning rubber of such expert manipulation.
Fittingly, "Red Hook Road" begins with the taking of the wedding photos, that tense herding of giddy bridesmaids, hung-over groomsmen and anxious parents when the artificiality of the marriage ceremony is spun to its highest sugary peaks. Waldman applies a dollop of satire, but the summer day could not be more lovely: The white clapboard church along the Maine shore, the carefully restored reception hall, the sumptuous food, all of it has been expensively arranged with "a kind of rustic opulence, at once simple and glorious." The better to wound us on page 34 when the groom's brother stumbles in "ashen, his bow tie askew," causing the bride's sister to stand "frozen in place, as if nailed to the ground." (Tragically, in moments of real drama, Waldman steers directly into oncoming cliches.)
Not to speak ill of the dead, but it would have been nice if the late groom and his brief wife hadn't been such paragons of romantic bliss. Sweethearts since they were 16, Becca and John are the kindest, smartest, prettiest couple you'd ever want to meet: She plays the violin; he designs yachts. I expected bluebirds to bring the veil.
Of course, Waldman knows a thing or two about perfect unions herself. Five years ago, this Harvard-trained lawyer rubbed our faces in her fairy-tale marriage to America's hippest writer, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon. She published an essay proclaiming that she'd rather have sex with Chabon -- "always vital, even torrid" -- than build Lego castles with her kids (who wouldn't?). Then, per the standard PR routine, she feigned shock and disappointment when that column established her as the infamous "Bad Mother" of a thousand op-eds, blog postings and the inevitable Oprah appearance. And last year she published an unapologetic collection called "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace."
Since she gave up her law career, most of what Waldman has published has been about motherhood, including the snappy books in her "Mommy-Track" mystery series. But while her nonfiction is often witty, her recent novels reflect the lingering agony of her decision to terminate a pregnancy after learning that her fetus carried a genetic defect. The mother in her previous novel, "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits" (2006), has lost her baby to SIDS. And now, "Red Hook Road" focuses on two mothers who lose their adult children on what was to be the happiest day of their lives.
I never realized it before, but my shelves are depressed by a wide range of fine novels about grief, a catalog of smothered pain that includes Elizabeth Strout's "Abide With Me," Kiara Brinkman's "Up High in the Trees," Sue Miller's "Lake Shore Limited," Francine Prose's "Goldengrove" and even offbeat novels like Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," Stephen King's "Lisey's Story" and Reif Larsen's "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet." Ask your friends what novel provided a sounding board for their sorrow, and you'll be surprised by how many shades of black there are.
Waldman's sharp eye for social detail makes her particularly good with the loneliness and awkwardness of modern grief. The abandonment of all those fussy Victorian customs along with the loss of any common religious vocabulary leave her characters wandering in a boundless but unacknowledged cloud of sadness, resenting neighbors' nervous platitudes ("The Lord don't give us more than we can bear") and empty, earnest questions ("How are you doing?"). The story, organized around the first three anniversaries of Becca and John's death, is a sobering reminder that when it comes to commemorating loss, we're all bumping around in the dark.
Waldman writes beautifully about "the persistence of love and work and affection in the face of sorrow," but what's impressive about "Red Hook Road" isn't limited to her thoughts on grief. Along with lots of wonderful detail about restoring wooden boats and an engaging subplot involving classical music, her best insights are about class conflict in a modest Maine town that endures an annual three-month influx of wealthy, sophisticated visitors who like to think the place belongs to them. The bride's mother, Iris, is a fantastic creation -- prickly and demanding, so determined to control every aspect of life that she seems to be daring the gods to scuttle her plans. A professor of Holocaust studies at Columbia University, Iris is a brilliant, aggressive woman who has been meticulously rehabilitating her summer cottage and affirming her position in East Red Hook for decades. On the wedding day, Waldman explains, "all her hopes for the Grange Hall and for the place that she had made for herself in the village had reached their apotheosis. In this beautiful building first imagined and financed by her great-great-grandfather, her daughter would celebrate her marriage to a man whose roots in the town went deeper even than her own."
But there's the rub -- or the rube: Her counterpart, Jane, the groom's mother, is a flinty Mainer who used to clean Iris' house and grits her teeth at the professor's obnoxious presumptuousness. To Jane, even Iris' generosity seems infected with her desire to control everyone, an impression Iris senses but seems powerless to resist making. Waldman brings out the humor and the distress of their culture clash: "Jane had no interest in any relationship with Iris other than the most formal, her manner making Iris so uncomfortable that she inevitably found herself fulfilling what she imagined to be Jane's worst expectations of the fancy-pants New York from-away: frivolous, silly, and above all, condescending. When Iris spoke to Jane, her voice crept into a high, shrill register and she said the most absurd things. ... It maddened Iris to find herself forced to act out the position of lady of the manor." But if marriage makes in-laws strange bedfellows, grief is an even more brutal matchmaker, and Waldman follows the awkward dance of these two bereft mothers over the next few years as they and their families try to negotiate the gaping hole in their lives.
Sadly, the end of the novel is a car wreck of a different sort, a sudden loss of narrative control that sends the story careening into melodrama and psychological breakthroughs. Until that point, though, Waldman keeps her eyes on the road, carrying us into dark territory with wisdom and grace. As usual, she offers something to admire and something to annoy -- something borrowed, something blue. Yes, it's an emotional workout, even if you don't usually cry at weddings, but it's worth attending for the more thoughtful reflections that linger after the bouquets have wilted.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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WILLIAM GOLDING: The Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies'
John Carey
Free Press
ISBN 9781439187326
573 pages
$32.50
Reviewed by Wendy Smith
William Golding's literary career culminated in the early 1980s with a Booker Prize for his seafaring drama "Rites of Passage" and a Nobel Prize for a body of work that ranged from "The Inheritors," a tragic account of peaceful Neanderthals done in by weapon-wielding Homo sapiens, to his visionary tour de force, "Darkness Visible." None of those works, however, entered popular culture with the primal force of Golding's tale of schoolboys stranded on an island who quickly give way to their most savage instincts. Someone younger might have been unmoored by being the author of the book that "replaced Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye' as the bible of the American adolescent," but Golding was nearly 43 when "Lord of the Flies" was published in his native England in 1954, and 50 when the runaway success of the American paperback edition enabled him to give up his uncongenial post at a Salisbury grammar school. His preoccupations as a writer and a man, John Carey demonstrates in this thoughtful biography, had already been fixed.
The conflict between reason and faith, neither of which can wholly ameliorate human cruelty, was waged in Golding's breast long before it became the subject of his fiction. His father, a popular schoolteacher in Wiltshire, was an atheist, socialist and rationalist; his mother shared her husband's "advanced" views. Both endeavored to disabuse their sensitive, fearful son of what they saw as his superstitious tendencies. Yet his most powerful childhood memory was a vision of a benign spectral presence in his bedroom: "a glimpse of 'the spiritual, the miraculous,'" Carey writes, quoting from an unpublished autobiographical fragment, "that (Golding) hoarded in his memory as a refuge from 'the bloody cold daylight I've spent my life in, except when drunk.'"
Drunkenness became a problem early on; Golding was sacked from his first teaching job in 1939 at least partly for drinking too much. Alcohol may have blunted the humiliation of being judged "not quite a gent" at class-conscious Oxford. And it may have helped with the guilt he felt over jilting a hometown fiancee to marry Ann Brookfield, whose mother also worried about his alcohol consumption. Carey gently presents Golding's lifelong weakness as the self-medication of "a deeply self-examining and self-blaming man who, as he said more than once, saw the seeds of all evil in his own heart."
Service in the navy during World War II confirmed Golding's jaundiced view of human nature, especially his own: "I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort," he later wrote. Nothing in his outwardly ordinary postwar existence as a husband, father and lackadaisical schoolmaster justified such a comment, but Carey makes excellent use of Golding's personal papers to delineate the turbulent inner life that fueled both his creativity and his harsh evaluation of unexceptional failings.
In this context, "Lord of the Flies" -- shamelessly written in the classroom while his students labored at make-work tasks -- can be better understood as a salvo in the author's battle between dark impulses and the longing to transcend them. Charles Monteith, the Faber and Faber editor who plucked the manuscript from the reject pile, encouraged Golding to eliminate religious echoes that suggested Simon's death was a willing martyrdom. Golding reluctantly complied, and perhaps his more mystical original would not have been as popular as the published version. With subsequent novels, he would not so readily accede to demands that the action be "explicable in purely rational terms," and his critical reputation occasionally suffered as a consequence.
By the time "Lord of the Flies" became a cultural phenomenon, Golding had published three more novels, all well received despite some carping from the upper-crust intellectual establishment. Once he gained the financial freedom to write and live as he pleased, his pace slowed, and his output lessened; he traveled extensively, gardened obsessively and went through more drafts of shorter texts. In the early '70s, he endured a writer's block that lasted four-and-a-half years. Success had not changed his bleak view that rationalism was insufficient to nourish the human soul, but "belief did not mean you were a better person." His son's 1969 nervous breakdown, the beginning of a long struggle with mental illness, confirmed his sense that "the name of our God is Random."
Writing "Darkness Visible" restored his equilibrium and productivity. Golding published four subsequent novels and had completed a draft of a fifth when he was found dead on the bedroom floor of his home in Cornwall in 1993. Carey's depiction of his final two decades, during which he was honored by a knighthood as well as the Booker and Nobel prizes, suggests that they contained as much happiness as was possible for a man who considered himself "a monster in deed, word and thought." Golding's constant self-castigation seems hardly justified by the sporadic incidents of drunken abusiveness Carey records, or a few seamy sexual affairs in his youth, but this intelligent, elegantly written and deeply empathetic biography reminds us that the factual basis of a writer's neuroses is less important than the imaginative use he makes of them. Golding took the darkness he found in his own heart and rendered it visible in novels that examine with pity and horror "the long nightmare which is the bedrock of being human."
Wendy Smith is a contributing editor of the American Scholar.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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