A Woman Underground by Andrew Klavan

Published by Mysterious Press on October 15, 2024

A Woman Underground begins with a prologue, but it is the prologue to Treachery in the Night, a self-published novel that portrays white nationalists as the nation’s saviors. A character named Miranda is living with a brute named Theo before a bigger brute named Moran marches Theo into the woods and returns to claim Miranda as his prize.

Cameron Winter believes that Miranda is modeled on a girl he loved before he was old enough to understand the emotion. Winter arrives at this conclusion after recognizing the girl’s perfume outside his door and then glimpsing someone in a security video who might or might not be his old flame Charlotte. The woman is carrying a book with a partially exposed title. Winter matches the partial cover to Treachery in the Night, starts reading the book, and concludes for no obvious reason that Miranda is Charlotte. Winter rides an improbable logic train, but improbability is the norm in modern thrillers.

Winter is an English professor who formerly worked as a spy or assassin for one of those shadowy government agencies that are a thriller staple. Winter is a broken man. He meets regularly with Margaret Whitaker, a therapist who presumably has a security clearance. She replaced a therapist who fell in love with Winter. Margaret is also in love with him, making me think that Winter must be quite the hunk — or that women just dig assassins.

Despite her feelings about Winter, Margaret wants him to make a date with a woman who asked him to ask her out. She believes his obsession with Charlotte is preventing him from moving forward with a potential relationship. Most people abandon their childhood crushes when they reach adulthood, but Winter can’t for reasons that Margeret articulates after reaching deep into her bag of packaged explanations for stupid behavior.

Winter decides he needs to track down Charlotte, so there we have a plot. The endeavor brings him into contact with white nationalists and other disreputable people. The story takes place against a vague background of riots, violent clashes between left and right in unidentified cities.

Winter’s search for Charlotte is interwoven with a story from his past involving a search for Jerry Collins, an agent who disappeared while investigating child traffickers. Jerry’s disappearance relates to his knowledge of powerful men sleeping with kids — so many powerful men that they would fill Jeffrey Epstein’s island, but men with an appetite for sex partners who are even younger than Epstein’s. Frankly, the novel’s portrayal of nearly all powerful men as child molesters defied my usual willingness to accept the unbelievable for the sake of enjoying a thriller.

The story takes an odd turn when Cameron learns that his colleague, Roger Sexton, is carrying on with a student who makes a habit of shagging faculty. Cameron is too virtuous to sleep with a student, or perhaps he’s so hung up on his teen crush that other women fail to activate his libido. In any event, Roger’s dalliance with the student becomes an increasingly bizarre component of the plot and takes center stage when the student disappears. The circumstances of her disappearance again strained the limits of my willingness to get lost in the story.

Andrew Klavan has an addiction to adverbs that requires serious treatment. His prose is competent but unpolished. The pop psychology upon which Winter’s personality is based is probably needed to explain Winter’s obsession with Charlotte, but at least he has a personality. The wannabe Nazi characters are cartoonish, although I suppose that characterization might be accurate. Most members of America’s far right are not serious people.

Apart from its credibility issues, the plot is muddy. The major components — the search for Jerry, the search for Charlotte, and the drama that arises out of Roger’s sexual involvement with a student — do not fit together well. Roger’s plot thread comes across as filler that is included to pad the word count. On the other hand, a final twist in the epilogue is satisfying. While the story will probably maintain the interest of thriller fans, I doubt that they will become invested in plot threads that, in the end, just don’t make much sense.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht

First published in Germany in 2021; published in translation by Liveright on October 22, 2024

The narrator in Eurotrash shares the name of the novel’s author. Whether the story is autobiographical I don’t know, although the narrator is a writer whose first novel was Faserland, as was the first novel of the real Christian Knacht. The line between the fictional Christian and the real one is blurred when the narrator’s mother, out of the blue, asks him whether is aware that they “are being described in a book right now, like Cervantes?” Blurring the line between reality and fiction is a staple of postmodern fiction, but I can’t say it ever impresses me.

Fictional Christian’s father, like the real Christian, had a father named Christian. After World War II, Christian’s fictional father was sent to America “to learn about democracy and bring it back to a ravaged Germany.” His father invented a fictional life in America, bragging of feats he never achieved. The novel’s early pages recount Christian’s attempt to learn the truth about his father.

Like a good bit of fiction from Germany, Eurotrash tentatively explores the impact of the Nazi party on the descendants of Hitler’s faithful. Christian blames his family for doing too little to resist the Nazis (particularly a grandfather who went through denazification and returned to Germany to organize a new group of Nordic nationalists). “The people to blame for the entire misery of the world are you and me,” Christian tells his mother.

Christian’s mother celebrated her eightieth birthday in a psychiatric ward. She was released to her apartment in Zurich because (in Christian’s view) she is able to fool doctors into believing she is in sound mental health. Christian’s mother enjoys cheap white wine, vodka, and phenobarbital. Perhaps those substances scramble her brain, but they probably help her cope with the repeated rapes she endured when she was eleven.

Christian tells himself that it is “an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family.” Christian may be fooling himself. Although Christian visits his mother in Zurich once a month, she complains that he is not an attentive son. Christian decides to take her on a trip, with the secret goal of depositing her in a vegan commune he saw in a brochure. He plans to tell his mother that the commune is a luxury resort and then disappear.

Christian hires a driver and off they go. Christian’s mother stops at her bank and withdraws a bag full of cash for their trip. She has a colostomy bag but she just fired her housekeeper, the only person who knew how to change it. On the trip, the task falls to Christian, much to his chagrin.

The commune’s pro-Nazi philosophy is not what Christian expected. The road trip continues, to Feutersoey for trout, to the mountains to see edelweiss in bloom, to Morges to see the house where Christian’s father died, finally to a Geneva cemetery to visit the grave of Borges. Perhaps Christian will even take his mother to Africa to see zebras, something she insists she has always wanted to do. Or perhaps he will tell his mother that she is in Africa and trust that her flirtation with dementia will turn the story into reality. Or perhaps his mother simply wills her own reality into being.

While Germany’s history hovers over the story like a storm cloud, the story that eventually emerges is personal. It is the story of a mother and son, both of whom feel guilty about the absence of a firm connection. They spend most of their road trip quarreling, perhaps developing a new understanding of each other, perhaps approaching a forgiveness that goes unspoken.

Although steeped in family history, the story generates sympathy for its two central characters, notwithstanding their aggravating natures. Christian’s approach to his mother is passive-aggressive, while his mother’s approach to her son is manipulative. Christian sometimes pokes at his mother, at other times listens silently as she criticizes him: “I simply preferred silence, as everyone had preferred to swallow down and conceal and keep everything secret, for a whole dead, blind, and nasty century.” The dynamic between the characters, culminating in a surprising and ambiguously touching ending, gives the novel its tragic soul.

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I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

Published by ‎ St. Martin's Press on September 24, 2024

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is both an indictment and a celebration of the internet. It’s also one of the funniest books I’ve read this year.

Abbott Coburn is an incel. Like other incels, he blames women for problems that extend beyond involuntary celibacy. Abbott has an anxiety disorder and depends on his medication to function. Even medicated, Abbott has no social skills.

Abbott lives with his father Hunter and earns money from a ride-share app by driving Hunter’s SUV. Abbott was bullied in high school and blames high school girls for the bullying because girls reward bullies with sex. Abbott has joined the hordes of young male vloggers who insist that they are victims of a conspiracy. The conspirators are either feminists or attractive women who won’t shag them, depending on the moment.

Abbott is such a dunce that he’s almost likeable. The dynamic between Abott and his father encourages the reader to feel Abbott is far from evil and not irretrievably lost to the internet’s dark side.

A woman named Ether asks Abbott for a ride across the country, from the West Coast to the East. When he explains that the app does not permit long-distance travel, she offers him a large payment of cash to work off the app, half in advance, provided he leaves behind his phone and laptop. The other hitch is that she’s transporting a large black box that might or might not display radiation decals. A mysterious employer paid Ether a large amount of cash to bring the box to his place outside of D.C.

Abbott sets aside his suspicion of women and accepts Ether’s terms because he needs cash to reboot his life. He soon realizes that Ether didn’t tell him that she’s being followed by a biker named Malort who wants to acquire the box for his own (presumably nefarious) purposes. Things get out of hand when Reddit users begin tracing Abbott and Ether on their trek, having convinced themselves that they are terrorists or heroes, no theory being too crazy to express as a certainty.

The story picks up additional characters as it bounces along, some of whom live almost entirely in the digital world. Zeke Ngata is in a wheelchair. He’s active on Reddit and a fan of Abbott’s vlog. Phil Green was a genius who lived off-grid in Canada. An anti-technology conspiracy theorist, Phil was convinced that software was rewiring human brains to turn us into zombies. Maybe he was right, but Phil is dead now, survived only by his blog. Phil had the black box when Ether first saw it, although he refused to reveal its contents.

A former FBI agent named Joan Key has a long list of problems (that’s why she’s a “former” fed). She sees the black box as an opportunity to rekindle her relationship with the FBI. Or, if she’s lucky, she’ll be near the box when it explodes, perhaps gaining postmortem recognition for her effort to avoid a catastrophe.

Key contributes to the narrative by expressing interesting opinions. She attributes school shootings and other random acts of mass violence to “aggrieved narcissism, a total inability to put personal affronts into perspective. Why shouldn’t others die for your petty humiliations, when you’re the Main Character of the Universe”? Key teams with Hunter to find Abbott before a wannabe internet hero kills him.

The characters come together in an action-adventure comedy that is driven by misunderstandings and (since people get their information from questionable internet sources) outright fabrications. The story is amusing — and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny — for multiple reasons, but my favorite is its depiction of Reddit as a haven for “mostly young males with a vast arsenal of shallow knowledge and free time.” Transcripts of Reddit conspiracy theories surrounding Abbott are hilarious. Was he taken hostage by a crazy woman? Was he abducted by aliens? Does the box in his father’s SUV contain the radioactive corpse of an alien? Is the box stuffed with the corpse of a woman who disappeared while visiting the state where Abbott lives? Is Abbott a terrorist who intends to set off a dirty bomb in Washington D.C.? Are people who post groundless conspiracy theories working for Russia or is that also a groundless conspiracy theory?

A reader might surmise that the title refers to the black box in Abbott’s SUV, but the “black box of doom” actually refers to the screens on our communication devices and the algorithms that assure our exposure to bad behavior, driving us to fear the badly behaving, who are inevitably depicted as people different from ourselves — different by race, gender, political affiliation, place of birth, or any other factor that allows us to distinguish ourselves as good people, unlike all the different kinds of people who are always causing trouble.

Abbott’s arguments with Ether about female manipulation of males are insightful in their realistic portrayal of opposing viewpoints, even if the viewpoints of both characters are easily mocked. I agree with Abbot’s view that it’s silly for women to put on a bikini and then complain that they feel objectified when they are noticed by visibly appreciative men. But it’s even sillier for Abbott to claim that he’d rather be raped than to be falsely accused of rape because rape victims get sympathy while society always condemns accused are men.

Ether wants to teach Abbott a lesson that all incels should internalize — “you can actually get over bad things that happen to you.” The story at least forces Abbott to grow up, to start making decisions for himself rather than blaming the world for his empty life.

What’s in the box? The answer, carefully set up by scenes that might quickly be forgotten in this fast-moving story, is delightful. Just know that the climax is wild and funny. Some scenes have the credibility of Road Runner cartoons, but comedy doesn’t need to be credible.

I would recommend the novel just for its goofiness and the Looney Tunes feel of its final act, but I am even more enthused about the characters’ semi-serious discussions of significant social issues: the potential impact of growing up with screen interactions rather than human touch; the incel movement that links young men with stunted social skills; and the ridiculous (and potentially dangerous) nature of the conspiracy theories that these socially challenged men devote their lives to spreading in the hope of improving their self-worth. Those are discussions that society should be having. For that reason, I'm Starting to Worry would be a good book for book clubs that actually discuss books rather than gossiping about book club members who didn't make it to the meeting.

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The Lantern of Lost Memories by Sanaka Hiiraki

Publsihed in Japan in 2019; published in translation by ‎ Grand Central Publishing on September 17, 2024

When Hatsu Yagi, at the age of 92, finds herself in a photography studio with no memory of her arrival, she realizes she is dead. The photographer, Hirasaka, tells her she is making a brief stop at the precise boundary between life and death on her way to an afterlife that he hasn’t experienced and thus cannot describe.

Hirasaka gives Hatsu large stacks of photographs, one photo of each day of her life, and asks her to select one from each year to attach to the lantern of memories. When her life flashes before her eyes as the lantern spins, she will see the scenes that she chooses before passing into the next stage.

One of the photos is faded because it’s such an important memory that Hatsu has worn it out by revisiting it so often. Hirasaka takes her back in time so she can take a new photo. She’ll be a ghost in the sense that others won’t see her, but she’s solid enough to take a picture.

When they travel to 1948, Hatsu tells Hirasaka the story of a small neighborhood in Tokyo where she worked as a nursery schoolteacher in a daycare that met in a field before it raised enough money to buy an old bus that would shelter the children when it rained. The story of her life is touching and sweet. The novel is in part a remembrance of the hard times that followed Japan’s defeat in the war, a life that was particularly difficult for all the children who died of dysentery.

Hirasaka’s next guest is Waniguchi, a criminal who was stabbed to death in his forties. The criminal tells an amusing story about an employee named Mouse who fixes things, although Mouse doesn’t understand the difference between broken and dead. Some things, Mouse will eventually learn, can’t be fixed. As Waniguichi’s lantern spins, he contemplates all the wrong choices he made, all the paths he took when different paths at life’s crossroads might have spared him a grisly death.

Hirasaka helps the dead decorate their lanterns with photographs, but he doesn’t remember his own life. He believes he lived a boring life, that he is unremembered, that he is destined to have a boring existence between life and death, without any meaning or purpose. He has a photograph of himself, but he doesn’t recognize the setting and it hasn’t sparked any memories of his life. This is a mystery that the story eventually explains. The explanation underscores the theme that a boring existence can nevertheless be special in ways we can’t imagine.

The last meeting recounted in the novel is with an abused little girl named Mitsuru. She died and visited Hirasaka, but he knows she is destined to return to life, only to die again at the hands of her tormenter. That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever read. As he interacts with the girl, he finds a way to manipulate the rules and, in so doing, changes his own fate.

The story’s characters are memorable (I particularly liked Mouse). The novel’s clever construction ties the characters together in surprising ways. The story illustrates the power of photography and the importance of capturing images that might erode in an unassisted memory. I don’t like to use clichéd descriptions like “enriching” and “life affirming,” but if I resorted to clichés, those would be apt descriptions of The Lantern of Lost Memories.

The story’s point, I think, is that most people live "well out of the spotlight." They have an “undistinguished existence” with “no stirring accomplishments or feats of valour,” ending their lives as people who “never expected to amount to much, and never had.” Yet Sanaka Hiiragi illustrates how even ordinary people make a difference. In the words of David Bowie, we can be heroes, just for one day. Or we can make bad choices and be left with a stack of memories we’d rather not have. Other writers have taught the same lesson, but rarely with the degree of empathy and intelligence that Hiiragi brings to this story.

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Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 24, 2024

Shakespeare exercised dramatic license in the Scottish play by having Macduff kill Macbeth in his castle. As history records it, Macbeth was killed by forces loyal to Malcolm in the Battle of Lumphanan. Val McDermid’s take differs from both accounts, although she follows history more closely than Shakespeare did. Still, just like Shakespeare but without the glorious prose, she spins history into fiction.

Queen Gruoch Macbeth shared a throne with her husband for seventeen years before the Battle of Lumphanan robbed her of his love and sent her into exile. Gruoch is keeping her distance from Malcolm as she considers her future. She has “a name men would rally behind; Malcolm is shrewd enough to realize that, and to fear it.” The novel is thus, at least initially, the imagined story of Gruoch as she struggles to survive in hiding while grieving her husband’s death.

The novel’s backstory is told in flashbacks. Gruoch was with Gille Coemgáin in an arranged and childless marriage. Macbeth heard that his cousin Gille’s hands were red with the blood of his father. Macbeth came to see him so he could judge the man’s guilt before taking his revenge. When they met, Gruoch believed that Macbeth looked at her “like the woman she was meant to be.”

One of the three women who attend Grunoch, a handmaiden named Eithne who is said to be a witch, told her that Macbeth “will be the one. He will surely plant a King.” Grunoch needs no further encouragement. Suffice it to say that there will be passages worthy of inclusion in an adult romance novel.

To avoid the risk of making Gille suspicious, Grunoch and Macbeth communicate by sending bunches of flowers to each other via Angus, Macbeth’s messenger. One of Grunoch’s trusted women is an herbalist who speaks the language of flowers. Macbeth has an herbalist who also serves as translator. Their bouquets speak of patience (wild garlic) and hardship (milk-gowan), but no translation is needed for the forget-me-nots. That’s clever.

McDermid completes the backstory by imagining that Macbeth takes a grisly revenge through means that are consistent with history. In the present-time narrative, Gruoch struggles to keep her band of women safe until Eithne enters a trance and tells her to “go west — all the way west.” She must evade or slay Malcolm’s spies and fight McDuff before the story takes a twist that marks a sharp departure from history.

The happy ending has all the credibility of a fairy tale, although I credit McDermid for subplots that follow a tragic path. I mean, you can’t have a Macbeth story without tragedy, so likable but less important characters will meet their unhappy fates before the last curtain falls.

I’m not sure Macbeth needs a sequel, although writers seem to enjoy writing them. McDermid is no Shakespeare, but who is? Her prose is clear and crisp while occasionally bordering on elegance. Action and adventure (and the occasional stabbing) move the plot briskly. The story’s charm won’t be lost on fans of Macbeth even if they might cringe at its non-tragic outcome.

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