My Friend Natalia by Laura Lindstedt

Published in Finland in 2019; published in translation by W.W. Norton & Co./Liveright Publishing on March 23, 2021

My Friend Natalia is a novel of therapy, told from the perspective of an unnamed therapist whose gender is never explicitly identified (I’ll call the therapist “she” for the sake of convenience). Natalia is the therapist’s patient. Her name probably isn’t Natalia; she encouraged the therapist to tell her story so the therapist is apparently preserving confidentiality when she says “Let’s call her Natalia.” As the title suggests, the therapist comes close to crossing professional boundaries, although it’s not entirely clear that she really regards Natalia as a friend. She does, however, allow Natalia to masturbate on her office couch during one of the therapy sessions, which is a pretty friendly thing to do. Natalia makes clear that she has a sexual attraction to her therapist, but it isn’t unusual for Natalia to feel a sexual attraction to the people in her life.

Natalia is pursuing therapy to address her obsession with sex. It’s all she ever thinks about. Sex is interesting, so Natalia’s stories about her sex life are interesting. They aren’t particularly titillating, so My Friend Natalia doesn’t work as porn, notwithstanding two impressive sketches of a penis and vagina that Natalia creates for her therapist. Nor are they particularly enlightening, as I doubt that Natalia’s personal experiences can be generalized in a productive way. The therapist draws conclusions — “Natalia went through both men and words as a way of masking her own vulnerability” — that might be more insightful than Natalia’s stories of sexuality unbound.

The therapy sessions are based on story-telling exercises, in which Natalia must invent stories that incorporate key words provided by the therapist. Natalia is loquacious. Her stories cover the chosen words like spilled water, flowing along multiple paths, seemingly at random, one element giving birth to a tangent that flows seamlessly into another. Natalia begins a story with a pornographic comic that she encountered in her childhood, then veers into a lecture on Sartre’s view of women as holes, discusses cinematic technique, and relates memories of her father peeling potatoes before she explains how her discovery of a woman’s buried body turned out to be something quite different .She discusses feminism. She ponders whether it is better to be a head without a body or a body without a head (she chooses the latter because a head can’t masturbate).

Laura Lindstedt’s prose is graceful and imaginative. I enjoyed her description of an erection as “a plea for the waiting to end.” Still, I think it likely that the novel’s meaning eluded me. A fair amount of attention is paid to a work of art hanging on the therapist’s wall called “Ear-Mouth,” a work that once belonged to Natalia’s grandmother. It disturbs her to see it on the therapist’s wall. It disturbs the therapist that Natalia perches an alarm clock on her belly during the sessions, keeping her own track of time. What does any of that mean? I don’t have a clue. Some of the story’s moments are sufficiently bizarre that they amuse, but I imagine there is more to the story than amusement. The ending sort of trails away. As is generally true of talk therapy, no obvious self-awareness ensues, although Natalia claims to have changed. Perhaps my inability to give My Friend Natalia more than a middling recommendation is my fault, but I can only bring what I have to the table, and what I have is confusion.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Deep Strike by Rick Campbell

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 16, 2021

Deep Strike is a story of submarines chasing and shooting torpedoes at other submarines. That’s what I look for in a Rick Campbell novel. The rest of the book is an ordinary thriller, but the underwater scenes are exceptional. This is the sixth book in a series but if you just read it for the action, you can easily get by without the context provided in the earlier novels.

The plot is driven by a villain named Lonnie Mixell who (too coincidentally) was the college buddy of Jake Harrison, a CIA paramilitary operations officer who has played the role of hero throughout this series. Mixell is a SEAL who went to prison and now has a grudge against the American government.

Using funding from al-Qaeda, Mixell bribes a Russian submarine captain to fire missiles at twenty American targets. The Russian captain accepts the bribe because his daughter has a disease that won’t respond to conventional treatment, although a very expensive treatment will save her life. That’s just a bit too convenient, but it sets the action in motion and maybe that’s all that matters. The Russian thinks he’s firing conventional missiles, not knowing that additional bribes have resulted in nuclear warheads being substituted for conventional warheads. As if that won’t cause enough mayhem, Mixell has an additional plan to cripple the American government that is revealed late in the novel.

Harrison has his work cut out for him, but much of the story takes place underwater. Early in the novel, an American submarine trails a Russian sub as it leaves port. Unaware that the Russian sub is commanded by a desperate man who plans to attack the US, the American commander thinks he’s on a routine mission.

After the mission takes an unfortunate turn, it’s up to a bunch of smart people with expensive technology to figure out where the Russian sub might be headed. Another American submarine sails into action, leading to the aforementioned submarine warfare. Campbell always combines technical precision with tactical savvy to create gripping scenes as submarine crews shoot and dodge torpedoes.

Some aspects of Deep Strike are bothersome. In the tradition of implausible thrillers, a villain captures a hero, wastes time explaining his plan to the hero, and then keeps the hero alive so that the hero can thwart the plan. Why doesn’t the villain just kill the hero before he carries out the plan? Because then the thriller wouldn’t have a happy ending.

A second plot thread involves Harrison’s partner, who seems to be a psychopath. Harrison is warned to keep an eye on her because her partners tend to die. Instead of reporting her behavior when she engages in unnecessary violence, or later when she ponders killing Harrison to prevent him from reporting what he saw, Harrison gives her a pass. I mean, team loyalty is one thing, but letting a crazed killer stay in her job without at least calling the boss’ attention to her professional inadequacies seems like piss poor job performance. The plot thread is an unnecessary distraction, particularly since another of Harrison’s partners also turns out to be less than ideal. How much bad partner drama does a thriller need?

The scenes leading up to and following the submarine warfare are standard thriller fare. They are executed with competence, but they aren’t fresh or exciting. Harrison’s non-relationship with CIA director Christine O’Connor, a character who played a central role in some earlier novels, gains no traction in this one. They both fret about what might have been but that’s old news, recycled from earlier novels. Neither of them has enough personality to make the reader care about their relationship. As far as I’m concerned, everything else in the book is ho-hum background to the real point of a Rick Campbell novel: submarines in action. But for me, and perhaps for other fans of submarine thrillers, that’s enough.

RECOMMENDED

Central Park by Guillaume Musso

First published in France in 2014; published in translation by Little, Brown and Company/Back Bay Books on March 16, 2021

Alice Schaefer is a 38-year-old police detective in Paris. Feeling sorry for herself, she goes out with the girls and gets toasted. The next thing she knows, she’s waking up in Central Park, handcuffed to a stranger. According to her watch, several hours have passed, but how could she have possibly made it to Central Park without being aware of passing through customs or immigration? She doesn’t have identification or money, but she does have blood on her blouse. The guy to whom she is handcuffed tells her that he was playing jazz in a bar in Dublin the night before and has no idea how he ended up in her company. The guy has something carved into his arm and Alice has some numbers written on her hand.

The idea behind Central Park — waking up in an unfamiliar place with no memory of arriving there — is a familiar basis for a thriller plot. To make a novel like this work, the author must create an original explanation for the gap in the protagonist’s memory. Then the author needs to sell the reader on the plausibility of that explanation. Guillaume Musso deserves credit for concocting an explanation I didn’t expect but fails to make the explanation remotely credible.

The story is entertaining if the reader doesn’t stop to think about it. Alice embarks on a series of adventures to (1) free herself from the handcuffs and (2) figure out why she was handcuffed to a guy in Central Park in the first place. She doesn’t go to the police because, being a cop, she believes that involving the police without knowing why she has blood on her blouse will only make her life worse. She eventually gets some investigative help from her best friend in Paris, Seymour Lombart, leading to predictable confusion about the identity of the jazz pianist to whom she is joined at the wrist. To add to the confusion, she finds a GPS tracker in her shoes. She also finds a small object implanted under her skin and does not understand how or when it got there. That’s a lot of unlikeliness for Musso to explain.

Alice’s backstory includes the usual tragic events that shape thriller heroes. She was estranged from her imprisoned father. She had a whirlwind romance with a man who died. She was tracking a killer named Erik Vaughn when she had an unexpected opportunity to arrest him. She took the initiative to make the arrest without calling for backup because that’s what thriller heroes do. Vaughn got the jump on her and stabbed her in the abdomen, changing her life in predictably tragic ways. Vaughn’s fate after that crime is uncertain, as it must be to make the plot work. Alice’s dismal life is supposed to earn the reader’s sympathy, but it features the same package of woes that are common to thriller characters. The package fails to generate real emotion, and the ending is such an obvious attempt to manipulate the reader’s emotions that I rejected it entirely.

Alice is remarkably slow-witted for a police detective, given her failure to ask a couple of obvious questions that would shed light on her situation. The story moves in unexpected directions but rarely follows a credible path. As the explanation of Alice’s plight slowly unfolds, my reaction was, “Really?” That’s not a positive reaction. The plot depends on a remarkable breach of professional ethics that, to avoid spoilers, I won’t explain. Suffice it to say that rational people don’t behave in the way that the book’s characters behave.

Suspension of disbelief is critical to a plot like this. My disbelief heightened with every new chapter. The story has the merit of being interesting — the plot kept me turning pages — but my disappointment at the reveal keeps me from giving Central Park an unqualified recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Win by Harlan Coben

Published by Grand Central Publishing on March 16, 2021

Remember those crazy protesters who were flinging Molotov cocktails around in the early 1970s? You probably don’t because there were too few to remember. The story told in Win imagines a group called the Jane Street 6, perhaps very loosely based on the Chicago 7. The Jane Street 6 threw two Molotov cocktails at an empty building during a protest. An errant throw frightened a bus driver who drove into river, killing his passengers. Authorities were quick to blame the "hippy" protesters for the bus driver’s careless failure to maintain control of his bus, but that’s neither here nor there. The Jane Street 6 disappeared, amazing the public with their ability to remain hidden, except for one who reappeared, served a brief sentence, and disappeared again.

Flash forward to the present. A man is murdered in a luxury New York City apartment. The victim had possession of an expensive painting that was stolen from the Lockwood family. Circumstances bring Windsor Home Lockwood III into the investigation, in part because a suitcase believed to be his is found at the murder scene, making him a potential suspect. The murder victim turns out to be Ry Strauss, one of the Jane Street 6.

We soon learn that Patricia Lockwood, the daughter of the younger brother of Win’s father, was abducted when she was eighteen and held in a building where multiple young women had been tortured and murdered. Her father was killed during her abduction and two Lockwood paintings disappeared from the family estate. The reappearance of a painting in Strauss’ apartment suggests that he had some involvement in the abduction and perhaps the torture of multiple young women decades earlier.

The story follows Win as he tries to piece together the connections between the art theft, his sister’s abduction, and the fates of the various members of the Jane Street 6. Win’s investigative efforts bring him into contact with a couple of people, including a member of the underworld, who have a reason to seek revenge for the inadvertent deaths associated with the Jane Street 6. Making all the connections entails a fair amount of legwork, distracting Win from his normal routine of shagging rich women and beating up people who, in his judgment, deserve a good beating. He eventually uncovers family secrets that surprise him — not that he is particularly bothered by unpleasant surprises, as any aspect of life that doesn’t have a direct impact on his pursuit of gratification barely registers with him.

Fortunately, I don’t necessarily need to like the characters to like a book. If Win were real, I would dislike him intensely. He’s smug, self-righteous, and he answers the phone by saying “Articulate.” How annoying is that? He excuses all sorts of morally unsound behavior by claiming that life is full of gray areas about which we make judgment calls. I agree with that but disagree that gray areas excuse mayhem. His philosophy of life is based largely on “I’m important and you’re not” coupled with “might makes right,” although only when he is the one who exercises the might. Win is a friend of Myron Bolitar, a Harlan Coben character I really like, and I frankly don’t understand why someone like Bolitar wouldn’t detest someone like Win. But they aren’t real people and they have been fictional buddies for years, so I’m not going to fret about it.

It is enough for me that Coben, an inconsistent storyteller, assembled a clever and reasonably credible puzzle in Win. And Win Lockwood is admittedly an interesting character, if only because he’s irritating and a bit loathsome but not quite reprehensible. His presence is tolerable as long as he advances the plot, and he manages to carry the story forward at a steady pace. Win is in many ways enjoyable, but I’ve been waiting five years for a new Myron Bolitar novel. While Win is a decent supporting character in a Bolitar novel, I’d rather spend my time with Bolitar.

RECOMMENDED

The Power Couple by Alex Berenson

Published by Simon & Schuster on February 9, 2021

Most novels that involve a kidnapped child — “a parent’s worst nightmare,” the blurbs usually say — emphasize parental anxiety. Those novels tend to be intolerably weepy and overly obvious in their manipulation of the reader’s emotions. They also tend to be formulaic. Either a resilient parent or a determined cop, or both acting together, foil the captor just before their child is about to be defiled or murdered, The End.

Alex Berenson gives the kidnapped child novel a new twist. Kira Unsworth is a lucky teen vacationing with her brother and parents in Europe. Rebecca works for the FBI and Brian is a coder for the NSA. Those jobs have decent pay — and they need it, the way Rebecca burns through money to signal her social status — but their financial security came from the two million dollars that Brian made, out of the blue, by developing and selling a gambling app.

Kira meets a young stud in a bar in Paris, then agrees to meet him again the next evening in a bar in Barcelona. She thinks she is being careful during her drinking and dancing spree, but she ends up being kidnapped. Her frantic parents use their law enforcement pull to get the authorities to search for her, but the captors were smooth and didn’t leave behind any obvious clues. Kira frets that she’s not being held for ransom but will be sold to a sheik as a hot American sex toy.

The first half of The Power Couple is interesting but ordinary, somewhat formulaic without making a concerted attempt to tug the reader’s heartstrings. In fact, sympathizing with either of the parents would be difficult, because they are both unlikable. That’s what makes the first half interesting. Rebecca is a workaholic who runs the marriage and (until he made two million bucks) always viewed her husband as being insufficiently ambitious and perhaps a bit slow-witted. Brian probably does lack ambition but he views his wife as an emasculating, power-hungry woman who doesn’t appreciate the contributions he brings to the table. Apart from decent parenting, Brian’s contributions are mostly nonexistent before he contributes money from the app, but that doesn’t stop Brian from resenting his wife for resenting him.

The story changes completely in the second half for reasons that, to avoid spoilers, I won’t discuss. The plot kicks off in a new and much better direction, encouraging the reader to rethink the reason for Kira’s kidnapping. The characters remain unsympathetic, apart from Kira who demonstrates some ass-kicking resilience that she probably inherited from her mother. If anything, her parents become even more unlikable: Brian, because he becomes more callous and self-centered (apart from his apparent love of his kids); and Kira, because (like most thriller cops) she’s quick to abuse her authority when the law gets in her way, and she’s more interested in vengeance than justice.

The novel’s ending is a bit disappointing — it's predictable and anticlimactic — but that doesn’t detract from the better chapters that precede it. This isn’t Alex Berenson’s best book, but the familiar beginning and disappointing ending bookend an entertaining plot that rises above the typical kidnapped child thriller.

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