John Woman by Walter Mosley

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 4, 2018

In John Woman, Walter Mosley again proves why his inclusion in my list of three favorite modern crime writers is not just laminated, but anchored in cement. John Woman is a crime novel in the way that Native Son and Crime and Punishment are crime novels. The books combines a crime plot with philosophy, psychology, and Tolstoy’s view that historical truth is elusive if not impossible to discover. It is fresh and original and a masterpiece in concept and execution.

Cornelius “CC” Jones lived with his father, Herman Jones, but he learned about life from his mother’s stories about the gangsters she dated. Herman reveres the English language, suggesting he might be modeled after Mosley, whose love of language is revealed in the lovely language he uses to tell his tales. But Herman is losing his words and finds himself living in the past, robbed of the present by the creeping onset of dementia.

Herman is hospitalized when the novel begins and bedridden for the next several years. CC secretly takes over Herman’s job as a projectionist so that the paychecks will keep coming. In 1955, when CC is 16, he commits a murder and is later seduced by a female cop who (unaware of the murder) enjoys dominating him. His mother has disappeared, apparently having accompanied a mobster who fled from the law.

When the novel shifts ahead to 1974, CC had adopted the identity of John Woman to protect himself from arrest for a murder he knows will eventually be discovered. He is a professor of history at a university founded and operated by members of a new age religion, a subgroup of which is known as the Platinum Path. He teaches his students that historical truth is a mirage shaped by the political, religious, and cultural biases of historians — a view that other faculty members view as undermining history and historians.

John Woman is rooted in a murder, but it is primarily a story of decent people who treat each other decently, people who value life and who understand the importance of generosity, forgiveness, and acceptance. Their decency transcends race or religion. History is full of heroes who spend time shaping a legacy, but life is full of heroes who will never be studied by historians — the friends who sacrifice to help us get through tough times, the strangers who make an effort to be kind to another stranger, the ordinary folk who make a difference in unseen ways that nevertheless change the world.

John Woman reminds us that what we don’t know about the people society regards as historically important vastly exceeds what we do know. We know even less about all the equally important people who shaped but have been lost to history. Making that point in a lecture to the faculty nearly costs Woman his job. His freedom (and thus his life) is at risk because his history as a murderer might be discovered — but it is a history he shares with many murderers, and yet another example of undiscovered historical knowledge.

The novel’s multiple themes include: bringing courage and dignity to death, the importance of understanding history to understanding life, casting off the chains of childhood to become an adult, rejection of false certainties in favor of intellectual inquiry, the nature of fate and destiny (“our purposes are not necessarily our intentions”), the need to shape the future rather than obsessing about the unchangeable past, the possibility of rising above the limited role that society might assign to people of a particular race or origin, the empowering recognition that oppressors are victims of their own oppression, the myth of white identity, the notion that denying someone else’s past (pretending, for example, that people of an oppressed group were never oppressed) is a form of murder, the drive people feel to judge each other and how little right they have to do it. And this: “There’s no value in persecuting someone for overcoming their history in an attempt to forge a better future.”

John Woman is a surprising character — he never does the expected, and is capable of both great empathy and cold calculation, able at any moment to make either the most or the least moral choice. He likens himself to the coyote of mythology, the cunning trickster. The plot of John Woman is also surprising. For all the novel’s surprises, however, it always maintains credibility; none of the plot twists are forced.. The intersection of John’s life with the Platinum Path adds suspense, as does the question of whether John will go to prison (and perhaps be transformed into predator or prey) for the crime he committed almost two decades earlier. Still, this is a novel of ideas (“the most dangerous products of humankind”) rather than thrills, of complex moral choices rather than fights and shootouts. It might be Mosley’s best work.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on September 11, 2018

The Forbidden Door is the fourth Jane Hawk novel. Each book is a long installment in a very long story, so there’s not much point in reading The Forbidden Door unless you’ve read the first three novels in the series. Despite Dean Koontz’ undeniable talent, I’m not sure it is worth the effort to read an unimaginative mind-control conspiracy story that could have been told in one or two books, or at most a trilogy, but that Koontz expanded to fill five books.

Jane Hawk was an FBI agent until her husband killed himself. Since he wasn’t the kind of guy to end it all, Jane did some research and discovered that suicides were spiking. She is apparently the only person in the world who managed to connect that statistic to a vast conspiracy involving nanotechnology that takes control of the human mind and renders people submissive to the orders of their masters.

The masters are the usual gang of high powered business leaders and politicians who want to shape the world by killing everyone who might make it better (people who, from their perspective, would be making it worse). The grand guru of the scheme devised a computer model to select the victims.

Jane is chasing these guys while hiding her son from them, since they are also chasing her. I’ve long wondered why the bad guys didn’t try harder to find the kid, and in this fourth novel they finally listened to me. The plot of The Forbidden Room involves the conspirators narrowing the search for Jane’s son, who eventually stays with a genius named Cornell Jasperson who is coping with autism, agoraphobia, and a host of other mental disorders and fears, all of which Jane’s son and his two dogs seem on the verge of miraculously curing. Like all of the “good guy” characters in this series, Cornell is a paradigm of niceness.

Two very nice characters who played important supporting roles in earlier novels, a black sheriff named Luther Tillman and an elderly widower named Bernie Riggowitz, return to play similar roles in Jane’s quest to save her son from the clutches of the conspirators. The plot consists of Jane figuring out how to reach her son and get him to safety (again), alternating with scenes of her son and his dogs bonding with Cornell and scenes of the bad guys doing their mind control thing (which turns out to have a flaw, suggested by the novel’s title, that creates a new kind of danger).

Like other novels in the series, this one feels padded. In fact, the entire novel seems like filler. Koontz always does a masterful job of creating likable characters, but in this series characters tend to be created and discarded in a series of mini-stories that are consistent with the larger plot but that could just as easily have been omitted. I suppose that’s an inevitable product of turning a one-novel idea into multiple novels.

Nor does Koontz imbue his characters with the kind of complexity that characterizes his best work. Hawk is such a capable, caring, selfless individual, seemingly lacking even the slightest imperfection, that she also lacks any dimension of depth. Cornell and Bernie are at least quirky, but they come across as stereotypes (Cornell reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man and Bernie reminded me of a less crusty version of the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine). Sadly enough, the novel’s most interesting character is a bad guy who believes he has been cast in a play and is being directed on an illusory stage by an Unknown Playwright.

Koontz at his best is such a good writer that it is disappointing when he isn’t at his best. The entire series seems to have been written on auto-pilot, and The Forbidden Door does so little to advance the plot that it stands as the weakest of the four books. Book five is scheduled for 2019. I hope that Koontz can find his groove after cashing in on this unoriginal premise. I recommended the first three books because they are mindlessly enjoyable, but at this point I would hesitate to recommend the series as a whole, and I view The Forbidden Door as a novel that is only worth reading for the sake of finishing the series.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Early Work by Andrew Martin

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 10, 2018

Early Work is a well-written domestic comedy-drama. It isn't sufficiently funny to work as a comedy and the characters avoid the deep relationships that give drama to domestic life. To the extent that there’s a plot, it centers on the characters’ ever-changing and frequently overlapping sex lives, and on the ability people have to screw up their lives by chasing something they might not really want. The book has occasional moments of amusement or interest, but the story drifts along until it drifts away.

Early Work feels like an early work — the work of a writer who isn’t quite sure what he wants to say, or perhaps one who has strong writing skills but doesn't know what to do with them. There is more skill than substance on display here. The novel showcases a group of young people who are trying to figure out what the future might hold, but the story fizzles out without offering any greater insight than the possibility of starting something new in the morning.

Early Work is initially narrated by Peter Cunningham, an aspiring writer who dropped out of a PhD program at Yale to live with his girlfriend Julia, a poet who is attending medical school in Virginia so that she can earn a living. Peter has published a couple of stories but seems incapable of finishing a novel, so he is earning a living as a composition instructor at a community college, a gig that gets him a weekly teaching session at a women’s prison. At a party given by their mutual friend Anna, Peter connects with a woman named Leslie, also an aspiring writer, and perhaps the connection is stronger than it should be, given his relationship with Julia. Kate the bartender, who also writes and teaches writing, knows everyone.

Point of view shifts as the story continues, sometimes telling us the backstory of a character from a third person perspective, sometimes returning to the present and Peter’s reflections on his woeful life. The reader moves back to a time when Kate began an affair with Leslie despite Leslie’s occasional desire to be comforted by sex with men. We read about a dinner that brings together Peter, Julia, Leslie, and Leslie’s fiancé Brian, and we learn how Leslie and Brian met. Julia and Peter dissect their relationship while taking a vacation with their old friend Colin. Relationship landmarks happen in Peter’s life, but mostly he complains about his inability to write anything despite his self-identification as a writer.

The aspiring writers have witty and sophisticated conversations about literature and sex, making Early Work a literary version of Sex and the City but with fewer laughs and less interesting characters. Maybe real people actually have effortlessly witty conversations like the characters in Early Work, but conversations like these always come across to me as scripted, and that’s one of the novel’s flaws. Characters converse in a determined effort to prove how interesting they are. I think they sleep together for the same reason. Self-involved characters accuse other characters of being self-involved. Even when they catalog their long lists of failings, they are more self-pitying than insightful. They display wit in abundance but I’m not sure they have much heart. Maybe that’s the point, but reading about heartless characters gets old pretty quickly.

The characters are obnoxiously trendy in their discussions of books and music and food, but I’m not sure if Andrew Martin meant to lampoon trendiness or to showcase it as a desirable characteristic of witty people — particularly witty people who fancy themselves writers, as do most of the characters except for “local foods” guru Brian. Early Work is a short book but, despite its stylistic appeal, I struggled to get through it, primarily because I didn’t think any of its characters are worth knowing.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Drop by Drop by Morgan Llywelyn

Published by Tor Books on June 26, 2018

Drop by Drop is a concept in search of a purpose. The concept is interesting. Everything made of petrochemicals, including plastics and most car tires, has started to disintegrate. Not everything has disintegrated at once, but things that aren't made of metal or wood are coming apart drop by drop, seemingly at random.

Here's how Morgan Llywelyn sets up the concept: Bank employee Dwayne Nyeberger sees Lila Ragland in the town of Sycamore River and is convinced she has come back to ruin him. Lila, the town’s party girl, has been missing and presumed dead for years. Eleanor Bennett, whose bank card was just rejected by an ATM as it turned to goo, doesn’t need Nyeberger's drama. Other bank customers are having similar problems; their cards, like the pens in the bank, are dissolving, drop by drop. Head teller Bea Fontaine asks her worldly nephew, Jack Reece, what might be making the plastic melt, but he doesn’t have a clue.

So far, so good. But having established the concept, what does Llywelyn do with it? Not nearly enough. Lila was planning to bring cybercrime to Sycamore River but that plan went south when her AllCom (a futuristic smartphone) melted to goo. Robert Bennett, the town’s wealthy industrialist, dies in an explosion at his company headquarters. His widow, Nell, gets over that pretty quickly and begins a romance. The plot offers an underdeveloped murder mystery, a dull love story, and the banging drums of a Sino-Russian war that nobody knows much about, given the difficulty of obtaining news in the age of goo.

As a post-apocalyptic novel, Drop by Drop is surprisingly uneventful. Since “the Change” happens slowly, people adapt to it with a minimum of fuss. They complain about horse manure in the streets when a local entrepreneur opens a horse-and-buggy taxi service, but readers might find it difficult to view an excess of horse poo as an apocalyptic event.

Perhaps the story is meant to demonstrate the resilience of humanity by showing how the characters cope with a life without plastic, but mostly they cope by meeting in a tavern once a week and pondering the cause of the Change, which [mild spoiler] we never learn [/mild spoiler]. However, the characters are so drab that challenging them with an actual crisis might at least have motivated them to do something interesting. Some characters refer to head teller Bea as “Aunt Bea,” and she reminded me of Aunt Bea from the old Andy Griffith Show — a pleasant person who frets a good bit but has no discernable personality. Most of the characters in the book could be described in the same way. The Andy Griffith Show at least had Barney Fife and Otis the town drunk to add humor to a sedate town. The characters in Sycamore River inspire yawns rather than laughs.

Drop by Drop is apparently the first novel of a trilogy, so explanations of key events in the novel might eventually be forthcoming. So little happens in Drop by Drop, however, that I don’t feel motivated to read the remaining novels. The concept is interesting, but Llywelyn’s purpose in writing the novel never becomes clear. If she meant to say something meaningful, she had an entire book in which hint at it. I lack the patience to read two more novels to figure out why she wrote this one.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Ohio by Stephen Markley

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 21, 2018

In 2007, high school football star Rick Brinklan gets a parade with a casket borrowed from Wal-Mart because the Marines need to keep his body while investigating his death. The town of New Canaan celebrates with a cake decorated with an America flag and speeches by the members of his football team and ex-girlfriends (except those who are too high or ashamed to speak). Six years later, four vehicles converge on New Canaan and Stephen Markley launches four intersecting stories.

Bill Ashcraft has driven drunk and high from New Orleans to Ohio, where he plans to deliver a package. He doesn’t know what’s in the package but he’s sure it isn’t legal. His return to New Canaan and chance encounters in taverns (not to mention even more drug and alcohol consumption) trigger high school memories of betrayals and broken friendships, one involving one of Rick’s girlfriends, who has a woeful story of her own to tell. Ashcraft’s more recent memories include the loss of his best friend from New Canaan, a singer-songwriter who died in LA while Ashcraft was attending the Occupy protest in New York.

Stacey Moore is traveling to New Canaan to deliver a letter. Stacey discovered her sexual identity in New Canaan, skating on the periphery of Brinklan’s crowd despite her relationships with Ashcraft’s girlfriend and with the songwriter. Stacey’s time in New Canaan, like Ashcraft’s, is punctuated by memories (mostly of her adventurous sex life), but she also has a conversation that gives the reader a clue about the contents of Ashcraft’s package.

Dan Eaton, home from the war but missing an eye and part of his soul, returns to New Canaan to see Hailey Kowalczyk, the object of his childhood crush and enduring love, who is now married to a kid he knew in school. Dan signed up for his last tour because as bad as Iraq or Afghanistan might be, they feel more like home to him than Ohio. Before Dan can find Hailey, he is waylaid by Ashcraft, encounters several high school friends at New Canaan bars, responds to violence as only a man with one eye can, and remembers disturbing incidents from his tours of duty.

Tina Ross didn’t move far from New Canaan. She makes a quick trip to New Canaan to find her high school love, a football player who used her, abused her, and left her damaged. Her story is, in many ways, the most gruesome part of the novel; it is not suitable for squeamish readers.

In the final chapter, we finally learn what was in the package Ashcraft brought to New Canaan and see the consequences of its delivery. The story then jumps ahead four years to resolve a couple of mysteries and tie characters together in new ways.

The destructive power of the secrets we carry is one of the novel’s themes. Another is the nature of dreams of the future, the random ways that life interferes with the opportunity to achieve them, and the need to fight for your dreams even if you know the battle cannot be won. Another is change: the way people change, the way people are changing the Earth, and the fear that the world might be changing in dark ways to which many residents of towns like New Canaan are deliberately oblivious.

Characters engage in political debate, but the disagreements are expressed in intelligent language; neither side of the divide is presented as buffoonery. At the same time, the debates expose the narrow-minded hypocrisy of bumper sticker patriots who base their opinions on the assumed superiority of white heterosexual American-born males (although readers who share that viewpoint might think the bigots get the better of the arguments).

Characters are the strength of Ohio. Many of the primary and collateral characters are decent people who make an effort to help broken people. The broken characters are inspirational in their own way as they “rage against the faceless entropy” and “endure the Truth and struggle to extinction.” As much as the novel rages against small town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, it also recognizes that small towns are filled with people who reject bigotry and embrace the values of compassion and understanding. Those people are often taken for granted, but they are the people who give small towns whatever heart and soul they might have.

The first three stories are exceptional. Tina’s story is powerful but a bit forced, while the key event of the final chapter is too far removed from the story that precedes it to be convincing. While the four stories intersect, they never quite add up to something greater than their parts. Apart from the key event in the last chapter to which I alluded, the ways in which the stories tie together in the final chapter are clever, but the resolution doesn’t do justice to the deeper stories that precede it.

Still, some of the novel’s passages are breath-stopping in their perceptive examination of troubled characters who are struggling to find a way to make sense of life. While the stories don’t quite cohere to make an entirely successful novel, viewed a series of long, connected stories that provide an in-depth examination of haunted characters in a small Ohio town (perhaps the modern version of Winesburg), Ohio approaches the status of masterpiece.

RECOMMENDED