Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

Published by Harper on June 4, 2013 

"More concept than substance, food is the idea of satisfaction, far more powerful than satisfaction itself, which is why diet can exert the sway of religion or political zealotry." But as Pandora Halfdanarson learns, weight loss is a shabby religion: "you could only continue to worship at the altar of comestible restraint if you chronically failed your vows." Pandora has gained more than twenty pounds in the last three years, but she doesn't stand out in a generation of people who are battling (or surrendering to) obesity, who are marked as members of an underclass because of their weight. Many participate in "the national sport" of dieting, but few succeed. Pandora's obsession with her weight and that of her brother -- and, by extension, our national obsession with our own appearance and that of others -- is at the heart of Big Brother.

Quietly subversive, studiously non-opinionated, confidently dull, and intensely self-critical, Pandora is the epitome of a Lionel Shriver protagonist. The daughter of a former television star who has faded from the national memory, Pandora is a married loner, comfortably living within her own mind. Not wanting to be "a hyperlink to someone else's Wikipedia page," she shuns the derivative fame that her father's stage name brings. She would prefer anonymity to the celebrity she attained when her successful business, Baby Monotonous, landed her on magazine covers.

Pandora's brother, Edison, does not share her insular nature. He can talk all day, "at the end of which no one knew him any better than before," and he has adopted their father's stage name as his own. Edison's career as a jazz pianist isn't going well. Needing a place to live, he travels to Iowa to stay with Pandora. Seeing Edison for the first time in several years, Pandora is shocked to discover that he is huge, a very big brother indeed. At first, Pandora doesn't know how to broach the subject tactfully and so ignores it, but: "The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit."

To the extent that Big Brother is (as Shriver's novels so often are) an exploration of a social problem by illustrating its impact on a single family, Pandora's attempt to understand and explain Edison's obesity can be taken as Shriver's effort to understand why so many people gobble down Cinnabons and Big Macs, knowing they are putting their health at risk. Does Edison overeat because he's depressed or is he depressed because he's fat? Perhaps he binges to showcase his sense of failure on a grand scale. While Pandora's puzzlement about her brother approaches judgment -- something that is contrary to her nature and that leads her to question the stereotypes associated with size -- she also wonders why obesity's status as a social issue should make Edison's diet and lethargy anyone's business but Edison's. Or is eating oneself to death the business of everyone who cares about the eater?

Just as Shriver frequently draws literary themes from social issues, she is a tireless explorer of marital and family issues. Pandora has an inflexible husband, a rebellious teenage stepson, and a needy brother. She wonders how much support a sibling can expect when the sibling's demands are a source of marital stress. Fletcher Feuerbach, Pandora's husband, represents Edison's opposite extreme: he bicycles fifty miles a day and refuses to eat anything made from white flour. Edison's oversized presence drives a wedge between Pandora and Fletcher. Fletcher wants to escape Edison's "miasma of sloth," but Fletcher's rigid diet is just as maddening as Edison's unwillingness to diet. When Pandora accuses Fletcher of being on "a moral crusade" against fat, she exposes his true motivation for complaining about Edison: the complaints stoke his own sense of superiority.

To avoid spoilers, I won't discuss the meat of the story. Suffice it to say that diets have their downsides and that the honest portrayal of family drama is Shriver's greatest skill. The wry humor that often seeds Shriver's work is abundant here, but she remains one of the most serious, insightful, and penetrating chroniclers of the human condition to be found in current American literature. She writes with sensitivity and compassion, from a variety of perspectives, without ever becoming preachy. An ending that recasts the story in a different light initially disappointed me, but after I thought about it, I came to understand and appreciate it. This isn't Shriver's best work, but it's awfully good.

RECOMMENDED

The Doll by Taylor Stevens

Published by Crown on June 4, 2013

You don't want to mess with Vanessa Michael Munroe. She has serious anger management issues. When she's mad, she becomes feral, blindly psychopathic in her rage, behaving like the Incredible Hulk without the green skin or the growth spurt. When she's calm, her calculating intelligence shines. The winning combination -- intelligent fury -- makes Munroe one of my favorite thriller protagonists.

The Doll begins with Munroe's fall from her motorcycle. An ambulance whisks her away, but the patient who is admitted to the hospital isn't our heroine. Munroe's closest friend, Sherebiah Logan, has also been snatched, leaving Miles Bradford (Munroe's lover and occasional employer) and his team of mercenaries to search for them. Munroe and Logan have been taken by the Doll Man, who is keeping Logan as a hostage to assure that Munroe will use her talents to undertake a mission on his behalf. It's not entirely convincing that the Doll Man couldn't have used his own people rather than the troublesome Munroe to get the job done, but that's the set-up and I was able to roll with it.

Not coincidentally, Neeva Eckridge, an actress and the child of prominent parents, has been missing for two weeks. Munroe had been trying to find her before the Doll Man intervened. The connection between these stories becomes apparent in the early chapters. During the first half of the novel, the focus shifts between Munroe and Bradford, with Munroe becoming the dominant character in the second half.

Is the story entirely believable? I'm not sure any of the Munroe stories are entirely believable, but they are told with such speed and intensity that Taylor Stevens always hooks me. She makes me suspend my disbelief for the sake of enjoying the experience.

Munroe is a complex character, often a dangerous, amoral sociopath, yet motivated by compassion for the innocent.  She often plays the role of vigilante.  Unlike other thriller heroes who are driven by vigilantism, however, Munroe makes no pretense of adhering to a higher moral code. When she kills, she is a creature of instinct. For that reason, I find her easier to accept than the more sanctimonious vigilantes in thrillerdom. Not just in Munroe, but in at least one other central character, Stevens blurs the line between villain and victim, creating moral ambiguity that is both realistic and refreshing. Of course, some readers dislike moral ambiguity, and they might be put off by Munroe and by the novel for the very reasons I admire it.

Although The Doll makes frequent references to (and reintroduces some characters from) the first two novels in the series, it would be easy to read this as a stand-alone novel without becoming lost. Stevens fills in enough of the backstory to make Munroe's life understandable. If anything, she repeats herself unnecessarily while explaining the events that shaped Munroe's life. Fortunately, the narrative never bogs down; the story is always in motion.

As much as I enjoyed the characters in The Doll (one of the bad guys is particularly well drawn), the first two novels had stronger plots. This story amounts to a series of extended chase scenes, with Munroe sometimes acting as pursuer, sometimes as the pursued. It delivers thrills, and that's what a thriller should do, but it isn't as memorable as the earlier books. On the other hand, Munroe's final confrontation with the Doll Man is as powerful and surprising as anything in the previous novels.

RECOMMENDED

The Alteration by Kingsley Amis

First published in Great Britain in 1976; republished with an introduction by William Gibson by NYRB Classics on May 7, 2013

Kingsley Amis was a science fiction fan, so it shouldn't be surprising that he tried his hand at a science fiction theme. The Alteration is an alternate history with the merest whiff of steampunk. It pays tribute to one of the finest alternate histories, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, secretly admired by some of The Alteration's characters as a forbidden book about a forbidden book. Cleverly, Amis describes an alternate version of Dick's novel, a device that acquaints the reader with the alternate world that Amis imagines, in which the Vatican controls all of Christendom (except for the small, relatively powerless nation of New England), science has been suppressed, and electricity is regarded as sinful.

In 1976, the highlight of a Requiem Mass for a recently deceased King is the beautiful voice of ten-year-old Hubert Anvil, a prodigy both as a singer and as a composer. The occasion brings to England the director of the Sistine Choir and the leading singer in the secular opero, both of whom are eunuchs, as well as Cornelius van den Haag, the Ambassador from New England. They debate Hubert's future: he can be either a great soprano or a great composer, but history has shown the impossibility of succeeding at both. If his calling is to remain a soprano, of course, he will need to visit a surgeon before he reaches puberty. The influential Italians believe that is the course Hubert's life must take.

Before Hubert can be altered, the church needs the permission of Hubert's father, Tobias, and of his confessor, Father Lyall, who voices reservations about the procedure. The opinion of Hubert's mother, Margaret, is irrelevant to everyone except Father Lyall, who has a sinful desire for Tobias' wife. Hubert's own opinion is equally irrelevant, and he probably would not have one but for his curiosity about sex. On the other hand, it's hard to say no to the Pope. When Hubert eventually makes his decision (although, technically, it is not his to make), intrigue ensues. Fate (which some will see as divine intervention) also seems to play an ironic role, but sometimes fate is guided by the hand of man.

And so, as fans of Kingsley Amis would expect, we have a book full of adulterers, hypocrites, sycophants, scoundrels, back-stabbers, manipulators, worriers, and the merely confused. Although filled with the wry humor that typifies a Kingsley Amis novel, The Alteration also explores philosophical issues. Does foregoing the possibility of physical love truly serve God, or does it serve only the earthbound interests of the church? Why is the suppression of pleasure so often the mission of religion? Does the celibacy of the priesthood make it impossible for the church hierarchy to understand the importance of family and the desire to procreate? When praying for God's protection, is it wrong to pray for protection from the church?

While The Alteration is a book of large themes -- the relationship between church and state, the conflict between freedom and duty, the inherent right to defy corrupt authority -- it succeeds on a more intimate level because Hubert, in contrast to the members of the church hierarchy, is such an innocent, appealing figure. In addition, the novel works because the alternate world in which Hubert lives is artfully constructed. It is a dystopian world, but one that is vastly different from the worlds imagined in most dystopian literature. The ruthless and unyielding exercise of theocratic power in a western world dominated by a single religion is every bit as frightening as the totalitarian dictatorship of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Despite the church's pretensions to the contrary, it is not a world that is kind to the innocent.

Amis' prose is (as always) both fluid and precise. His ability to write about serious matters with a light touch is remarkable. Still, this is not light reading. Some passages are dense. The novel therefore requires the reader's effort, but the effort is well-rewarded.

RECOMMENDED

Scorpion Deception by Andrew Kaplan

Published by Harper on May 28, 2013

Scorpion is an all-too-typical thriller hero. Trained in the Rangers and Delta Force (aren't they all?), an operative with the CIA before resigning (don't they all?), now "a freelance agent known only to certain top echelons within the intelligence community," Scorpion has the ability to fire his weapon unerringly while doing backflips and somersaults. That's almost as impressive as his ability to beat up five armed police officers while wearing handcuffs. Scorpion engages in the detailed and drooling discussions of weaponry and military technology that thriller writers use to establish their credentials. Every thriller with scenes in Africa must include a beautiful and idealistic female physician who beds the hero, and this one is no exception. There is, in fact, very little about this thriller that you haven't read before.

A group of bad guys bust into an American embassy, kill everyone in the building, and steal all the data from the computers. Apparently you can stick flash drives into some desktop computer in Switzerland and get every bit of classified information stored by the CIA, the NSA, and the DOD. Who knew? Scorpion, of course, is the only super-agent capable of finding out who the bad guys are, important information because Congress wants to declare war. I'm not sure it's possible for Congress to declare war on four guys in ski masks, but the CIA hopes to blame it on Iran, providing an excuse to bomb Tehran. The true villain is the Gardener, but who is the Gardener and for whom does he work? The plot -- and the safety of the world -- turns on Scorpion's search for answers to those questions.

Of course, from all the information in the computers, the bad guys immediately glean all there is to know about Scorpion and miraculously show up wherever he happens to be, but somehow they can't manage to kill him. That isn't surprising, but then, nothing about Scorpion Deception is surprising. The terrorists act like standard-issue terrorists. The female physician behaves like the standard brave-but-sexy idealistic doctor. Scorpion has the standard tough-guy-action-hero persona (aggressive, authoritarian, condescending) that, in too many thrillers, substitutes for an actual personality. For someone who attended Harvard and the Sorbonne, Scorpion doesn't seem especially bright. If you're looking for a multi-layered, nuanced protagonist, look elsewhere.

From predictable action scenes to the doctor Scorpion loves but doesn't want to endanger (and so of course he does), too much of Scorpion Deception is formulaic. A book that follows a formula can be good if the formula is good and if it's well executed, but Andrew Kaplan's execution is only so-so. Unbelievable dialog and a tendency toward melodrama make some parts of Scorpion Deception a chore to read, but most of the story is told in straightforward prose. When Kaplan uses common words or phrases in a foreign language, he immediately translates them (even when the meaning is obvious), apparently on the assumption that his readers are too dim to understand them. That gets to be annoying.

On a more positive note, the story that emerges in the novel's second half is moderately entertaining. It's too far over the top to allow full suspension of disbelief, but not outrageously so. The Gardener's identity is reasonably well concealed, lending a bit of mystery to the plot, although readers won't be shocked by the eventual unveiling. Unfortunately, the novel ends with a wildly unrealistic information dump that is intended (but fails) to cast the story in a different light.

Whatever merit the novel might have, there's little to distinguish Scorpion Deception from the blizzard of other action/spy novels that compete for the reader's attention. I wouldn't recommend this one to anyone other than a diehard fan of the series.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Wonder Bread Summer by Jessica Anya Blau

Published by Harper Perennial on May 28, 2013 

The Wonder Bread Summer is a light, amusing coming-of-age story set in the 1980s. Jessica Anya Blau's lean, breezy writing style makes the novel a quick and pleasant read, one that produces smiles and occasional outright laughter.

The child of a black-skinned, mixed race father and a half-Chinese mother, Allie is an unlikely redhead. She's had bad luck with parents (her mother left her to become the tambourine girl in a band, her father cares only about his restaurant) and with her only boyfriend (who borrowed her tuition money before breaking up with her). She has the insecurities that come from being twenty and not yet comfortable with her body or sure of her identity. Escaping from an obnoxious employer who has designs on her relative innocence and no intent to pay the wages he owes her (and whose side business is dealing drugs), Allie impulsively snatches his stash of cocaine on her way out the door.

So begins Allie's adventure in the unsheltered world, a series of mishaps that include a reunion with her mother's band, a date with a pornographer in a wheelchair (the story's only faltering step), and a happy encounter with Billy Idol. In the course of a relatively short time, she loses an old friend, gains new friends, rediscovers her dysfunctional parents, is amazed at the number of men she meets who want to show her their reproductive organs, and learns how difficult it is to hang onto a Wonder Bread bag full of uncut cocaine.

Allie has a knack for doing things that make her feel ashamed. It's an endearing quality. The theme here isn't so much "good girl turns bad" (as in Thelma & Louise) as it is "good girl makes inexplicably bad decisions." The story is barely believable but this is a comedy and a comedy doesn't need to be believable as long as it's funny. The story builds comic momentum as it zips along; the second half is much funnier than the first.

The protagonist in a coming-of-age novel generally discovers something about life. Allie should learn that life is better if you stop feeling sorry for yourself and clean up your own messes, but the novel's real lesson might be: revenge is sweet. It isn't a deep message, but it's satisfying. The same can be said for the novel as a whole.

RECOMMENDED