Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday April 1, 2011
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ROCK BOTTOM
Erin Brockovich with CJ Lyons
Vanguard
ISBN 978-1593156251
260 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan
Run for cover! A wall of toxic sludge is heading this way, burying everything in its path. Word is, even more spillage is gathering force behind this first wave, and more after that. Anything touched by this mass-produced poison curls up and dies within seconds.
"Rock Bottom" features such an environmental disaster, but I wasn't actually describing the book's climactic scene. I was talking about the novel itself, a dopey, brain-withering suspense tale by Erin Brockovich (with C.J. Lyons). Don't touch it! With any luck, this noxious nonsense will be quarantined in remainder bins seconds after its release, and the series it's supposed to launch will evaporate harmlessly into the ether.
Yes, this is the same Erin Brockovich (as played by Julia Roberts in the eponymous film) who, as a humble law clerk, took on utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric for polluting drinking water in the town of Hinkley, Calif. In 1996, Brockovich won the largest toxic tort settlement in U.S. history. So what's this famous muckraker doing inflicting this sloppy mystery on innocent consumers? The phrase "cashing in" comes to mind. Shame, shame. If there were an Environmental Protection Agency for literature, this novel would be cited for reckless contamination of a genre.
In shaping her plot, Brockovich clutched tight to the old adage: Write what you know. The novel's young heroine, Angela Joy Palladino (A.J.), made a name for herself as an environmental activist: As the novel opens, she's seen capitalizing on that momentary fame by hosting a radio call-in show, which bills her as "The People's Champion." (A caller who's become unemployed because of A.J.'s activism proceeds to shoot himself on air. The show is instantly terminated.) As a single mother of a boy with cerebral palsy, A.J. is desperate for work, so she decides to swallow her pride and return to her home town of Scotia, W.Va., to become an assistant to the town's rabble-rousing lawyer.
Ten years earlier, A.J. had left Scotia in disgrace, when she became pregnant by the local coal baron's feckless son, a hunk named Cole Masterson. But when A.J. and her son arrive back home, she finds that the lawyer, who had wanted to prosecute the coal baron for all sorts of sooty crimes, has died, apparently of a heart attack. Faster than you can say "Erin Brockovich meets Dallas meets 'Fatal Attraction,'" A.J. and the lawyer's daughter join forces to find out whether the old crusader was, in fact, murdered. Along the way, they battle the combined threats of mountaintop-removal mining; an overhanging ooze of coal slurry that threatens to drizzle down on the local elementary school; and Cole's crazed, childless wife, Waverly, who's determined to dispose of A.J. and her son.
The language of this hoot n' holler hell-raiser is as lumpy as the chicken and dumplings dinner special at the local diner. On returning to Scotia, A.J. comments, "Memories unearthed themselves like zombies clawing their way out of a freshly dug grave." Later on, a gay African-American resident explains his baffling fondness for the racist, homophobic community in pure Hallmark hokum:
"Came here on a temp job, and, well, there's just something about this place. ... It gets into you, you know? Like, all my life I've been searching for something and didn't even know it until I left the city and came out here, and suddenly everything makes sense."
Uh huh. If you say so.
Just when it seems like "Rock Bottom" can't get any more canned, we get the inevitable scene in which some psychopathic varmint in a pickup roars into view, hellbent on running one of the city-slicker good guys off a hairpin turn on one of the picturesque mountain roads.
In the end, the only thing genuine about this book is its title. As suspense fiction goes, it sure is "Rock Bottom."
Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE TRINITY SIX
Charles Cumming
St. Martin's
ISBN 978-0312675295
356 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post
It may be best to begin a discussion of Charles Cumming's brilliant "The Trinity Six" with a look at the all-too-real spy scandal that inspired it.
During the 1930s, a number of students at Trinity College, Cambridge, secretly joined the Community Party; over time, they advanced to senior positions in British intelligence. Their conspiracy began to unravel in 1951 when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fearing exposure, defected to the Soviet Union.
A few years later, amid talk of a "Third Man," Kim Philby, too, fled to Moscow. Still later, it was revealed that Sir Anthony Blunt, an intelligence officer who became the queen's art adviser, and John Cairncross, another intelligence agent during and after the war, had been the fourth and fifth members of the group, who were known as the Cambridge Five. (Grateful Soviet leaders called them the Magnificent Five.)
Cumming's novel focuses on the belated search for a sixth traitor. Sam Gaddis, a 43-year-old professor of Russian history at University College London, has a woman friend, a journalist, who is close to breaking a story about a sixth man. Then she dies of an apparent heart attack.
However, we readers know what Gaddis and the woman's husband do not, that she has been murdered. Gaddis, in urgent need of money for his ex-wife and child, decides to pursue the sixth-man story in the hope of writing a news-making, best-selling book. Soon he finds evidence that a 91-year-old member of the ring named Edward Crane may be alive and willing to talk.
But where is Crane? The search takes Gaddis from London to Moscow, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest and even New Zealand. At first, he is unaware that he is being closely watched by Russian and British intelligence agents; because of modern technology, precious few of his phone calls, e-mails or conversations remain secret. Others who know about Crane are murdered, and Gaddis realizes that his own life is at risk. Two attractive women help him, but he isn't sure he can trust them; in fact, one is an agent of Britain's MI6 spy agency.
All this, in the hands of a less talented writer, might have been a routine spy thriller, but there is nothing routine about "The Trinity Six." Cumming writes smart, seductive prose, and he's gifted at revealing the subtleties of personality. Scene after scene crackles with excitement, tension and suspense. The novel's ingenious plot is almost as complicated as real life, but as one astonishing revelation follows another, the book is all but impossible to put aside.
Finally, as a bonus for readers who have forgotten the story of the Cambridge Five, or never knew it, the novel is a welcome reminder of the greatest spy scandal of the 20th century.
One aging spy who knew the Cambridge Five offers Gaddis opinions on their personalities and motivations. Maclean hated America, he says, Burgess was ideological, and Philby was a sociopath. Some were gay, he notes, and may have been embittered because British law defined them as criminals. He adds: "Guy was also, of course, a famous philanderer. What Kim was to the girls, Guy was to the boys." Famous for his outrageous behavior when he was stationed in Washington during the war, Guy Burgess drank himself to an early death in Moscow in 1963.
In the novel, both the British and Russian governments fight to keep the sixth spy unknown. (British officials were for years accused of covering up or minimizing the harm done by the original Five, lest their own competence come into question.) Cumming pointedly makes the present-day Russian leader a character in his novel. He calls him Sergei Platov, but his history (KGB agent turned politician) is clearly meant to suggest Vladimir Putin. This strongman is described as, among other things, a monster, a murderer, a thug and a would-be czar. One wonders if this book is destined for publication in Russia.
With this novel, Cumming joins Error! Hyperlink reference not valid., David Ignatius and Olen Steinhauer among the most skillful current spy novelists, and he bears comparison with masters such as John le Carre and Error! Hyperlink reference not valid..
Indeed, "The Trinity Six" has a superficial resemblance to Greene's 1978 novel, "The Human Factor." Greene had worked with Kim Philby in British intelligence during the war and considered him a friend. "The Human Factor" is a psychological study that seeks to explain why a man might betray his country as shockingly and cynically as Philby did.
"The Trinity Six" is superior fiction, but it isn't a psychological study. It's a sophisticated thriller that takes its spies at face value and focuses on a conventional hero, a likable, stubborn and rather naive man, who is trying to survive in a world of duplicity and danger.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE ADULTS
Alison Espach
Scribner
ISBN 978-1439191859
307 pages
$25
Reviewed by Lisa Zeidner, whose last novel was "Layover." She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J.
It's hard to be a teenager, but it's even harder for a writer to capture a teen's voice in fiction. The unnerving adolescent habit of being worldly-wise one second and clueless the next can sound like a lack of authorial control on the page -- or, worse, coy and cloying. Salinger mastered the teen voice so well by celebrating his precocious protagonists' very instability. But he only aggravated the writer's difficulties, since any novelist attempting Smart and Sassy Teen now has to deal with the additional risk of doing a stale Salinger impression.
Alison Espach enters this thorny thicket with her first novel, "The Adults," and the good news is that she masters her teen's voice exceptionally well. Emily Vidal is only 14 when she begins to narrate her coming-of-age story, but, as she brags, she has "a wildly active prefrontal cortex." Most important, Emily is aware enough to understand how unaware she is. "The Adults" aims to pin down the elusive, in-between feeling of adolescence. "Being an adult, it seems, was horrible," Emily muses. "But being a child was awful too, and moving from one state to the other only meant you were moving closer to death."
At first glance, Emily's privileged Connecticut upbringing might seem familiar. These are the quietly dysfunctional suburbs that haven't changed all that much since Cheever. Emily's remote father is a Lehman Brothers muckety-muck who spends his time "sequestered in the basement with a phone and a new computer that virtually connected him to any part of the world he wanted, except the upstairs of our house." As freshmen in high school, Emily and her friends nurse crushes on boys, dissect fetal pigs, ask silly questions in sex ed and try not to think too deeply about too much. "If we had religious thoughts," she says, "they were only worries that we would die while wearing our retainers and then have to wear them for the rest of eternity." Emily is a fresh, funny observer of adolescent social customs, and Espach gives her high school material a likably dense, spiky texture.
Emily's problems deepen when her parents divorce and her lonely mother starts boozing it up. Worse yet, Emily is unfortunate enough to witness the suicide of the man who lives next door. That unhappy man's son is Emily's best friend and romantic interest -- and Emily's father is inconveniently having an affair with the neighbor's wife. Lastly, in case this isn't enough in the way of complications, Emily embarks on an affair with a young teacher, despite the principal's stern announcement that their high school has become a "Hug-Free Zone" to avoid any whiff of sexual implication.
In recounting this affair, Espach is at her best, capturing both the erotic appeal of Emily's initiation -- and her terror, along with her queasy, inchoate sense of being wronged. As Emily's father sighs when he finally learns about the affair, "Sometimes I feel like I know exactly who you are, and sometimes, I confess, I have no idea."
As "The Adults" moves along, Espach makes large leaps between periods in Emily's life. This kinetic, disjointed style has been popularized by several other successful books about young adults, most notably Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and Marisha Pessl's "Special Topics in Calamity Physics": odd, fey chapter titles and the stray numbered list. In general, Espach makes good use of the approach, although some readers may find her style of omitting material mannered or jarring. Emily's college years, for example, are barely mentioned, and she decides to become an interior designer without ever having shown a split second of interest in a building or object. (Actually, she sounds a lot more like someone who would major in creative writing.)
But then Espach isn't aiming to deliver a strictly realistic, fully delineated character study. "The Adults" is less a piece of cultural anthropology than a jaunty tone poem about the indeterminate years of young adulthood. As Emily so aptly describes the protracted adolescence of the contemporary American child, "I felt like a semisolid, like I was melting, or just about to harden."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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WEST OF HERE
Jonathan Evison
Algonquin
ISBN 978-1565129528
486 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Warning: Don't try to enjoy "West of Here" in snippets before bed. If you can't read all 500 pages in one marathon sitting, at least keep a list of the characters as they appear, or you'll get lost in the throng of Jonathan Evison's voracious story. It's 1889, when the Washington Territory -- the last frontier -- has been admitted to the Union. Into this rain-drenched wilderness, Evison introduces a town's worth of daring folk who dream and plot and clash as they carve lives in the "uncharted interior of the Olympic Peninsula." Surrounded by Shaker Indians, feminist Utopians, prophetic children, intrepid explorers, violent barkeepers, gold-hearted prostitutes and visionary dam builders, Evison puts his vertiginous camera on a tripod and gives it a good, swift spin.
Hold on tight because soon these short chapters are jumping back and forth to 2006 to follow the modern-day descendants of those original settlers -- with a Bigfoot cameo to boot! The result is fun, if dizzying: an American epic clutching an unfilled prescription for Ritalin.
With so much overflowing in these pages, it's fitting that a stupendous dam sits in the center of this sprawling story. Ethan Thornburgh, a failed accountant from Chicago, arrives in the fictional town of Port Bonita just as Washington becomes a state. It's a community so remote that it prints its own money, but Ethan is "going to civilize this place." Full of great ideas ("the electric stairs, the electric pencil sharpener, the magnetic coat hanger"), he sees the Elwha River as the ideal fuel for a hydroelectric plant that will propel the whole region into the future. That's an audacious plan for a penniless man with no connections -- his pregnant lover thinks he has "the common sense of a puppy" -- but irrepressible Ethan sees "flashes of a life yet to be lived, a bounty to be plucked out of the wilderness for the taking. ...He sincerely believes: in progress, in destiny, in his own place in history." And before you know it, the force of his boundless optimism plugs up a mighty river, harnesses millions of kilowatts and powers an economic revolution.
While all that (and more) plays out in the 1890s, alternating scenes whisk us to the depressed Port Bonita of 2006. The old Thornburgh Dam is about to be dismantled in a last-ditch effort of river restoration. With the salmon fished to the edge of extinction, only one processing plant remains, managed by a pale descendant of the legendary Ethan. All that chest-beating, manifest-destiny bravado looks like a cheat 120 years later. The economic boom Ethan sparked turned out to be a consumptive fire, and the social progress the Utopians hoped to set in motion now seems just as quixotic: The town is still almost entirely white; the Indians still live stunted, separate lives; and ambitious women who don't marry still endure slurs about their sexuality.
Evison sets up evocative parallels between the characters in these two time frames that demonstrate the poignant diminution of the American spirit. The great dreamers of the late-19th century have given way to people of narrowly circumscribed hopes, trapped in a dead-end small town. The men and women who once boldly imagined how they might reroute rivers and transform human relations have been supplanted by people who imagine how they might spend Saturday night on a bar stool.
And yet for all the Wild West scheming of those 1890s scenes, the novel's modern-day action offers its own special charm, largely because Evison is such an energetic storyteller who spools out a roster of quirky characters. Denied the awesome potential of an untamed world, his middle managers, factory workers and ex-cons are forced to explore a more interior realm than their errant ancestors. A parole officer, one of the town's few black men, tries to inspire his charges to imagine a better future; a salmon worker pursues the forest's mythical creatures; and a young woman searches for the strength to admit she's a lesbian. All these tales play out in Evison's brisk, often comic, always deeply sympathetic narrative about how modern, ordinary people still manage "the sort of reckless heroism that could drive a man to extraordinary acts."
Evison keeps all the strands of this novel winding along -- a feat of narrative acrobatics that's sometimes more dazzling than comprehensible. But tending to all those spinning subplots can lead to some aggravating shortcuts. So many characters and stories are crammed into this novel that they suffer from a degree of oxygen deficiency, which can make for lightheaded fun -- or give you a headache. Ethan Thornburgh, for instance, is wonderfully introduced, but since there isn't space to follow his progress, he's subjected to several clunky personality shifts and then dropped. Other fascinating characters, such as his feminist lover, are merely shipped back East. One mystical Indian would be too many, but we get two, with a touch of spooky time-travel that interrupts the novel's realism for reasons that remain only vaguely developed.
The Utopian community of old Port Bonita is sketched so lightly that it barely leaves a watermark on these pages. And the dam itself, an earth-moving project of awesome power and risky engineering, is, alas, described mostly in dispatches from offstage. Evison is reaching for a Tom Wolfe-like grasp of this place, but much of it runs through his fingers. Trying to articulate so many themes -- feminism, Indian integration, gay rights, environmental destruction, disability awareness, native spirituality, penal reform, manifest destiny -- the novel almost begins to blur as it rushes onward.
God help me for saying this, but I could have used twice as many pages to give all these stories room to breathe. And Evison is such an endearing, unpretentiously entertaining writer that I would have stayed up late to read every one.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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