Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet

Published by Crown on August 6, 2013

"A person can learn a lot from misery," says one of the characters in Save Yourself. If so, Kelly Braffet's characters are well-educated. The miseries of high school, of dysfunctional families, and of small town life are all vividly illustrated in Braffet's novel.

Patrick Cusimano's father, while driving drunk, killed a child named Ryan Czerpak. His brother Mike blames Patrick for calling the police to report his father's crime. The Czerpak family, on the other hand, has demonized Patrick because he waited nineteen hours before he called the police.

Two young women create additional tension in Patrick's life. One is Mike's girlfriend Caro, a waitress in a dead-end diner. The other is Layla Elshere, a sixteen-year-old Goth. As the daughter of a controversial preacher, Layla -- like Patrick -- knows what it is like to be ostracized because of an unpopular parent. Although Layla has a blood-drinking boyfriend, she is attracted to (and shares) Patrick's alienation, while Patrick justly regards Layla as a jailbait stalker.

The other key player is Layla's younger sister. Verna wants to be known as something other than the sister of "Freakshow" Elshere and is sometimes appalled by Layla's behavior, yet she's impatient with the repressed attitude of her parents and is drawn to the adventurous independence of Layla's antisocial friends.

With the possible exception of Verna, the characters in Save Yourself aren't particularly likable, but they've been written into being with such brutal honesty that whether they are likable is irrelevant. None of the primary characters are loathsome; they are capable of cruelty but they aren't malicious. Rather, they are reacting to the cruelty that surrounds them. Being nice, turning the other cheek, makes them feel powerless and marks them as weak. They're immature, confused, self-destructive, and insecure. They hate their lives. They have zero self-esteem and, given the parents and peers who are constantly pointing out their faults, it's easy to understand why. They are exploring possibilities, searching for acceptance, trying to empower themselves. They want better lives but they don't know how to change, so they dress up their lives "with some ugly throw pillows" and pretend to be satisfied. They make bad choices because that's what kids and young adults do, but Braffet makes their choices understandable (and forgivable).

Braffet's powerful storytelling drives home the theme of Save Yourself: that young people crave safety and acceptance and will do foolish things to attain them. She captures the perils of adolescence and young adulthood in language that is blunt but fluid. The male and female characters are equally convincing. The setting, a town of chain restaurants and beer bars and convenience stores that are "like purgatory, with snacks," is drawn with photographic realism.

Unfortunately, the storyline involving the Elshere sisters leads to an improbable denouement that struck me as contrived and out-of-step with the rest of the story. Braffet makes some of the novel's secondary characters ridiculously misogynistic and senselessly violent but fails to develop their personalities in a way that would make those characteristics believable. On the other hand, the resolution of the main conflict involving the two brothers is credible. The story of the brothers is dramatic while the story of the sisters becomes melodramatic. When the two stories intersect in the penultimate scene, the result is less than satisfying. Save Yourself isn't a bad novel -- much of it is quite good -- but had Braffet not been so determined to give the reader a thriller ending, she might have crafted a great novel.

RECOMMENDED

Sandrine's Case by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Mysterious Press on August 6, 2013

There are few novelists of intrigue I admire as much as Thomas Cook. Whether he's writing a spy story, a crime novel, or a courtroom drama, his approach is unconventional. Tension derives not from action but from the intense probing of his characters' lives. In Sandrine's Case, Cook uses a criminal trial to reveal not just the facts underlying a death, but the mind and soul of the accused, an unfeeling man who (his wife once said) is composed of scar tissue.

Sam Madison, an English professor at a liberal arts college in a small Georgia town, had a terrible argument with his wife Sandrine, a history professor at the same institution. He is accused of killing her and of attempting to disguise the murder as suicide. The evidence against him is circumstantial: a "sinister research history" on his computer; his role in obtaining the Demoral that killed her; the antihistamines in Sandrine's blood; a broken cup; a parody Sam wrote of noir fiction; "a silence when I should have spoken, a question I should have asked but hadn't." Sandrine had recently been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease, a condition that (according to the prosecutor) furnished Sam's motive: it was easier to kill than to face years serving as a caretaker, feeding and bathing his helpless wife. Sam fears that the jurors will despise him because he is an intellectual living a privileged life, but the most damning evidence against him are the words Sandrine spoke to her friends about Sam's detached, isolated nature. Sam is, according to Sandrine, a sociopath (or so she said in the last words she spoke to him), and he knows his "cold perhaps even haughty demeanor" is not playing well with the jury. He has good reason to fear that the trial has become a referendum on his marriage, that he will be punished for being a distant, uncaring husband.

The ultimate mystery in Sandrine's Case is not what Sam did or did not do, but whether Sam is correct in certain suspicions he begins to harbor about Sandrine. Since Sandrine's Case is told in the first person from Sam's perspective, it obviously isn't a whodunit. Sam feels enormous guilt, but for much of the novel his precise role in Sandrine's death is unclear. Was he possessed, after twenty years of sharing a home with his wife and daughter, to murder Sandrine, despite his belief that "no man had ever been loved by a more worthy woman"? As Sam slowly disintegrates -- thinking about the testimony of the witnesses at his trial, reliving the police interrogations, recalling (in bits and pieces) his life with Sandrine -- he begins, perhaps for the first time, to understand himself, to come to terms with his deep sense of failure, a judgment he "put on everyone else," particularly Sandrine, because he feared to judge himself. The testimony of witnesses teaches Sam what Sandrine really thought of him, and seeing himself through Sandrine's eyes is a revelatory experience.

Sam describes Sandrine's academic writing as "graceful and carefully measured," a description that applies equally to Cook's prose. Sam, who laments "what a low culture we have now," has never read a crime novel (unless you count Crime and Punishment or other works of literary genius). If he were to do so, Sandrine's Case would be a good place to start. Cook's insight into his characters and his elegant prose are undeniably the stuff of quality literature, yet he (unlike Sam, whose failed novel became more academic with each rewrite) never fails to tell a compelling story. There might be more courtroom theatrics in a Grisham novel, but there is more bare honesty, more heart, in Sandrine's Case than you'll find in a dozen Grishams. It is a strangely redemptive, life-affirming story about death, a decidedly different take on courtroom fiction, but in its own quiet way, a small masterpiece.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Lexicon by Max Barry

Published by Penguin Press on June 18, 2013

Research suggests that babies babble the phonemes of hundreds of languages and that parental encouragement of recognized sounds shapes the language the babies learn to speak.  If that is so, perhaps there is meaning in those root sounds that we don’t fully understand.  Maybe the brain has a fundamental language (akin to machine language) from which all other languages derive.  That concept, at any rate, provides a foundation for understanding the story that Max Barry tells in Lexicon.

Building on various “confusion of tongue” myths that explain the divergence of language (including the Tower of Babel), Lexicon becomes a contemplation of words:  how they shape our lives, how we use them as tools to manipulate others, how we weaponize them.  Barry’s novel imagines tangible words that literally have the power to kill, but it’s easy to see that as a metaphor for our use of words to control and even to destroy others, psychologically if not physically.

The story begins with Wi Parkel’s kidnapping from an airport.  People who have taken the names of dead poets are trying to kill him.  Wil has no idea why he’s been targeted.  Has he been mistaken for someone else, or has he forgotten his former identity?  He knows only that this has something to do with an incident that wiped out all three thousand residents of Broken Hill, Australia.

Soon the story takes us to Emily Ruff, sixteen and homeless.  Emily is recruited to take a series of tests because she’s unusually persuasive.  If she passes, she’ll attend a school where the teachers have taken the names of (mostly dead) poets.  The school’s approach to persuasion is holistic, with special attention to the power of words.

The narrative jumps around in time, challenging the reader to reorder the novel’s events in linear time to make sense of the story.  How Wil’s story will intersect with Emily’s isn’t immediately clear, although Barry plants clues in the first third of the novel that make it possible for the reader to guess the truth before it’s revealed.   The novel’s clever construction engages the reader’s attention by adding the elements of an intellectual mystery to two very different stories:  while Wil’s story has all the elements of a thriller (including chases and gun battles and a conspiracy that could lead to world domination), Emily’s is a science fiction coming-of-age tale.  The eventual joinder of the two stories transcends genres.

To the extent that it is a lengthy parable about the power of language, Lexicon strikes me as something that China Mieville might write.  They are stylistically different authors -- Barry uses more humor than Mieville -- but the depth of abstract thought that characterizes Mieville’s writing is present here.  Like Mieville, Barry takes familiar themes (“power corrupts”) and illustrates them in imaginative ways.  Barry riffs on the manipulative potential of the internet and on the insidious nature of online data collection while telling some of the story -- or providing enlightened commentary on the story’s themes -- in the form of IRC chats and online forum posts (including, a bit ironically, posts on Barry’s own online political forum).  He explores the conflict between our dual instincts for privacy and intimacy.  He suggests that we are enslaved by primal desires in the same way that words hold us in bondage.

Lexicon isn’t as purposefully goofy as some of Barry’s other novels, but like his other works, moments of humor lighten a serious theme.  It’s possible to put all of the deep thinking aside and enjoy Lexicon as an ingeniously plotted amalgam of genre stories:  romance and science fiction and action/adventure and mystery/thriller.  It’s better to appreciate Lexicon on each of its different levels:  for its humor, its excitement, and its ability to stimulate thought about the magical power of words (even words we don’t recognize or consciously understand ) to influence our lives.

RECOMMENDED

A Criminal Defense by Steven Gore

Published by Harper on July 30, 2013

Having read two of Steven Gore's Graham Gage novels (one was entertaining, the other just okay), I decided to try his latest Harlan Donnally novel. It convinced me that Gore should stick with Graham Gage.

The discovery of Mark Hamlin's naked body hanging from a rope in San Francisco's Fort Point leads retired homicide detective Donnally to play a reluctant role in the investigation of his murder. A judge (who behaves more like a prosecutor or police officer than a judge) appoints Donnally as "special master" to root through Hamlin's files looking for evidence that would lead to Hamlin's killer -- a suggestion, oddly enough, that Hamlin presciently made in a letter he wrote before his death. Why Hamlin didn't take greater care to avoid being murdered in never explained.

As he searches through Hamlin's files, Donnally follows leads that reveal preposterous criminal schemes in which Hamlin was engaged. He also discovers that Hamlin frequently traveled to Southeast Asia, leading Donnally to suspect (with no basis whatsoever) that Hamlin was a child predator.  In addition to Hamlin's clients, Donnally uncovers additional suspects, including the sister who inherits Hamlin's property and the lawyers who worked with or against Hamlin. Of course, the reader knows that most of these will be red herrings. They are also dull herrings. The truth is equally dull and not even momentarily credible.

Few of Gore's characters struck me as realistic, and I couldn't motivate myself to care about any of them. The criminals are one-dimensional caricatures of real people. Hamlin is a cartoonish stereotype of a dishonest lawyer, allegedly guilty of so many kinds of wrongdoing (including, laughably, opium addiction) that I wanted him to come back to life to defend himself. Donnally, on the other hand, is arrogant, self-righteous, and ill-informed. He hates everyone and everything. We get page after mind-numbing page of Donnally's condemnation of private defense attorneys (who are either incompetent or corrupt) and public defenders (who sell out their clients) and prosecutors (who make too many deals with the public defenders) and trials (which are just theater) and forensic psychologists (who say anything they are paid to say) and the city government (because it doesn't want to turn San Francisco into a police state) and drug cops (because they plant evidence and lie about their illegal searches) and judges (because they throw out the evidence that the drug cops acquire illegally) and hippies (because they're hippies) and his father (a filmmaker who didn't make "honest" movies). Donnally at least has the virtue of being an equal opportunity hater, but if anyone in the novel deserves to be hated, it's Donnally -- and that's not a good opinion for a reader to have of a thriller hero.

While none of the supporting characters are interesting, they aren't as obnoxious as Donnally (although some of them, including a character who is supposedly gay, seem to have a problem with gay men and lesbians). In fact, the only interesting aspect of A Criminal Defense is a scheme involving federal defendants accused of drug crimes who inform on other defendants. Gore has some insight into the way informants (whether or not they are truthful) drive the criminal justice system in federal court, and he understands the willingness of federal prosecutors and DEA agents to overlook their obvious lies. Unfortunately, the scheme isn't remotely plausible, and it comes too late in the novel to redeem a snooze-inducing plot.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey

Published by Harper Voyager on July 30, 2013

Kill City Blues is the fifth novel in the Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series.  Half-angel James Stark (sometimes known as Sandman Slim) is no longer Lucifer, although he still occupies Lucifer's penthouse at Chateau Marmont. Something not quite human wants to buy the Qomrama Om Ya (a weapon that kills gods) from Stark, but Stark doesn't have it. Since the Qomrama can be used to release the Angra Orn Ya (or to keep the Angra imprisoned), Stark decides finding it will be his best chance to protect humanity from an Angra invasion. The last Stark knew, the Qomrama was in the possession of a rogue angel named Aelita. His search for its current location takes him to Hell (of course), to a whole bunch of bars (naturally), and to a shopping mall called Kill City. Oddly enough, the story turns out to be a search for God (with a capital G), or at least for one of His parts, now that He's been broken into five separate entities.

The story is relatively mindless -- Sandman Slim finds a variety of ways to kill a variety of supernatural entities before they kill him -- but the prose is intelligent, as are the jokes, the snide comments about LA, and the snappy dialog. Kill City Blues works well as a tongue-in-cheek quest/adventure story. Dark humor is mixed with enough light humor to keep the tone from becoming oppressive, while periodic action scenes keep the story moving at a good pace.

Even if you've read all the Sandman Slim novels, it's difficult to keep track of all the gods, demons, angels, werewolves, zombies, vampires, ghosts, sylphs, Dark Eternals, Hellions, and other supernatural characters, not to mention Stark's friends (including a sin eating priest, a girlfriend who needs drugs to control her urge to drink the life out of people, and a guy with a malfunctioning mechanical body). Reading a Sandman Slim novel is like reading a guidebook to all the Netherworlds and spirit realms of the Earth's collected mythologies. Fortunately, Stark is the only one who really matters. He is fully endowed with personality (mostly snarky) and has enough mental anguish and moral qualms to keep a team of therapists busy for decades. The other characters exist only to contribute sideshow amusement.

Readers who don't have a sense of humor about religious beliefs (those who think it is blasphemous to portray God in non-Biblical terms) should probably avoid Kill City Blues. My favorite sentence is uttered to God (or a fraction of God) by Father Traven: "I devoted my life to you and now I see you're nothing but a ridiculous, foulmouthed little man." Talk about a crisis of faith!

I wouldn't call the novel's ending anti-climactic because it never actually reaches a climax. Kill City Blues has the feel of a book that was written to set up the next book in the series. That doesn't mean Kill City Blues is uneventful or that it tells a bad story, but the fizzling out, "to be continued" nature of the final pages is frustrating. I suppose the remedy is to wait for the next Sandman Slim novel. Fortunately, that's something I don't mind doing.

RECOMMENDED