The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

First published in Australia in 1940; published digitally by Open Road Media on October 23, 2012 

Henny, a character in The Man Who Loved Children, condemns every popular novel she reads as "silly rot, muck, and a lot of hooey." Perhaps Christina Stead wrote The Man Who Loved Children as an antidote to the popular novel. Its strength is the depth of its characters, yet the two most significant characters are so disagreeable that the book will never warm a reader's heart. By writing a novel with no likable characters and little plot, Stead shunned the formula for popularity. She nonetheless managed to craft a book worth reading, although you might cringe a few times before reaching the end and sigh with relief when you've finally conquered it.

To an outsider, living with the Pollitt family would be a maddening experience. Reading about the Pollitt family, on the other hand, is like watching a volcano that is about to erupt and destroy a village. The sense of impending horror is so strong I could only manage it in small doses. The parents are fascinating but repellent, a husband and wife who, wielding words as weapons, seem destined not just to destroy each other, but to bring about the metaphorical (and perhaps literal) annihilation of their entire family.

Sam and Henny deserve each other. Their blistering arguments make George and Martha of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem like Romeo and Juliet. Henny is a harridan, a "brackish well of hate." She is the queen of all drama queens. When she isn't promising to poison herself, she's threatening to beat all the children to death. She regards life "as a series of piracies of all powers." She is a compulsive and secretive borrower and spender. Although she hates Sam, Henny revels in the knowledge that "the dread power of wifehood" compels him to stay with her.

Sam is Henny's superficially cheerful opposite -- optimistic, full of love for his children -- yet at his core, there is little to distinguish Sam from Henny. Sam regards his marriage as years spent in "mental rot and spiritual death." He complains that he only wants to be understood, yet Henny understands him perfectly. Sam is, she says, "the great I-Am." Sam fancies himself the perfect husband and father while continually berating Henny and calling his daughter Louie a "great fat lump." Sam claims to be in love with his fellow man, yet he advocates eugenics and rules his own house with a tyrannical intolerance of individuality.

In addition to Louie (eleven when the novel begins, fourteen when it ends), who was born to Sam's first wife before she died, Sam and Henny have five children (Henny gives birth to another during the course of the novel). Sam believes his "great fitness is to be a leader of children." He thinks he is "teaching them to be good men and women" while "a woman was always twisting them, snatching them away from him." Sam doesn't want his children to grow up. He insists that Louie should stay with him forever. As the family descends into poverty, Sam barely notices. He wants more children.

Sam speaks a language that is all his own, a mixture of mispronunciations, rhymes, and gibberish that outsiders would regard as a foreign tongue. The language bonds his children to Sam while isolating them from neighbors and friends.

Sam's relationship with Louie is a little creepy. He is fascinated by "the mystery of female adolescence of which, in his prim boyhood, he had been ignorant." At the same time, he views himself as her guardian against impure influences. Sam wants to shelter Louie from the debauchery of dancing lessons and fine dresses. He views it as his duty to protect all his children from "filthy thoughts." The reader wonders whether Sam is trying to shelter himself from those thoughts, particularly with regard to Louie.

Louie is a moody girl who labors to constrain her inner beast. Although Sam forbids the reading of novels, Louie spends every free moment with books. She writes plays and sonnets, sometimes in languages that she invents. Louie is the only child who can see her father for the windbag he is. When the other children revel in Sam's silly rhymes about the neighbors, she lodges futile objections to his rudeness. Louie is so desperate for real love that she befriends wretched neighbors and begins writing love poetry to her teacher, Miss Aiden. Her other passion is for her friend Clare, who joins her "in days of mad fervor about nothing at all."

The novel follows the Pollits through setbacks and tribulations. Unfortunate characters litter the novel, including Sam's batty sisters and destitute in-laws. Sam's job takes him to Malaysia; his return ten months later is greeted with the birth of yet another child. Sam eventually loses his job, leading to the family's gradual decline into poverty. To the extent that the novel has a plot, it revolves around Henny's response to the family's financial decline, and the reactions of Sam and Louie to Henny.

I did not quickly adapt to the rambling, meandering, quirky style in which The Man Who Loved Children is written, although I eventually came to appreciate it. I did not ever warm to the sullen, broken, hypocritical characters who populate the novel, although I eventually came to admire the skill with which they are constructed, and to feel some sympathy for Louie. Despite its inevitability, the novel's denouement is both shocking and horrifying. For its unforgettable characters and often startling prose, I am glad I read The Man Who Loved Children, but I wouldn't want to read it again.

RECOMMENDED

A White Arrest by Ken Bruen

First published in the UK in 1998; published digitally by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on December 18, 2012

Although A White Arrest could be characterized as a police procedural, there is little police work and almost no detection on display. It might be better to think of A White Arrest as a crime novel. A White Arrest features plenty of crime, at least half of it committed by the police. Fundamentally, though, A White Arrest is a stark examination of three characters, all cops: Roberts, Brant, and Falls.

Neither Chief Inspector Roberts nor Detective Sergeant Brant are exemplary law enforcement officers. Roberts and Brant are likely to get sacked if they don't pull off a white arrest, the sort of legendary, career-making, front page arrest that guarantees lifetime employment. Their best chance would be to catch a serial killer known as The Umpire, who has been murdering cricket players. Another possibility would be to arrest the members of the E crew, a four person gang dedicated to killing dealers and stealing their drugs.

While Ken Bruen gives the reader a peek into the disturbed minds of The Umpire and the leader of the E crew, Bruen gives most of his attention to the cops, particularly Brant, whose mind is as unsettled as those of the criminals he's half-heartedly trying to catch. Brant is the jerk of all jerks, the kind of cop who takes bribes, steals money, abuses suspects, and stiffs the pizza delivery guy. When he isn't sexually harassing female officers, Brant is getting liquor on credit from the off-licence shop (a debt he never intends to pay), watching The Simpsons, and reading Ed McBain novels. He also fantasizes about shagging Roberts' wife, Fiona. Roberts certainly isn't getting satisfaction from Fiona, who (egged on by her friend Penny) has it on with a boytoy she hires at a club that caters to women of "a certain age."

Susan Falls is a female constable who joined the force to escape from a troubled family, only to find that the police are themselves a troubled family. Falls yearns for love. Sadly for her, she's in a Ken Bruen novel, where love is a scarce commodity.

As you'd expect from Bruen, A White Arrest is riddled with quotations from crime novels and movies (although the Umpire tends to quote Shakespeare, always a good source when it comes to murder). The novel's brisk pace and penetrating prose make it a quick read. Don't expect much in the way of plot, and don't expect the police to do anything that might actually solve a crime. Roberts and Brant don't always catch the bad guy, and when they do manage to make an arrest, it's more a function of luck than effort. A White Arrest isn't a novel for someone who wants a traditional police procedural filled with hard-working, likable cops. For readers who are intrigued by flawed characters living gritty lives, A White Arrest is -- like all of Bruen's novels -- meaty entertainment.

RECOMMENDED

Nexus by Ramez Naam

Published by Angry Robot on December 18, 2012 

What does it mean to be posthuman? It means with the right software, you can fight like Bruce Lee and perform like Peter North. It means your mind can network with those of other posthumans. It means your intelligence is vastly superior to that of mere humans. But can humans and posthumans coexist? Does the rise of the posthuman necessitate the death of the human? The questions posed in Nexus aren't new, but they have rarely been explored in such an entertaining fashion.

Although it is swallowed like a drug, Nexus is a nano-structure that creates an interface between the brain and computer software. It acts as a networking platform and an operating system. It creates the potential for one Nexus user to control another. Nexus is both a regulated drug and a prohibited technology. In short, it is illegal. Should it be?

Kaden Lane is one of a select group of people who, in addition to researching Nexus, is permanently infected with it. He thinks Nexus should be available to everyone, although he's worried that some users (and some governments) will abuse it. Samantha Cataranes works for a division of Homeland Security that responds to emerging risks. She views Nexus as a risk. She could lock up Kaden but she'd prefer to enlist his help for a more critical mission: determining whether the Chinese are using Nexus to create remote controlled assassins. If Kaden doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison, his task is to cozy up to Su-Yong Shu, suspected of being the primary architect of China's neurotech program. She is also suspected of being posthuman.

Kaden is a well-rounded, believable character. He isn't the only one. Samantha is Kaden's backup on the mission, a role that troubles her because she will need to use Nexus. The thought frightens her because she knows she enjoys Nexus despite her moral opposition to it, adding a layer of complexity to her character. Watson Cole, on the other hand, has no such qualms. Nexus gave him the gift of empathy. Once a battle-hardened marine, Cole is now a disciple of peace. Cole has a mission of his own: to make Nexus available to everyone, so they can experience the same transformation. While Cole's transformation occurs before the novel begins, Kaden and Samantha are continually questioning their beliefs, reevaluating their loyalties, evolving in response to new experiences and discoveries. They are fascinating characters.

Nexus gains intellectual heft from a contemporary philosophical debate that Ramez Naam projects into the future. Drugs and technology can be abused or they can be used responsibly. Should government prevent abuse by prohibiting the possession of anything new that might be abused, or should government tolerate a degree of abuse to promote individual freedom and societal advances? By developing and potentially releasing the means to develop posthuman life, is Kaden "threatening to make real humans obsolete," as Samantha argues, or is he empowering people with options they've never had before? This is the sort of debate that science fiction does so well -- anticipating ethical dilemmas of the future and, in so doing, shining a light on ethical dilemmas of the present.

Nexus tackles other issues as well, including the acquiescence of scientists in the suppression of science (scientists who protest put their research grants at risk) and the tendency of American foreign policy to disrupt or destroy the lives of innocent foreigners. Other things I liked about Nexus: the imaginative surveillance technology; the eagerness (as always) of the government to become just as bad as the bad guys it condemns; the grounding of repressive legislation in fear that the government instills, and the willingness of Americans to surrender their rights in response to those fears; the layers of intrigue; the characters' ever-changing perspectives of right and wrong; the true and surprising nature of Su-Yong Shu; the incorporation of Buddhist philosophy; the use of a virally infected religious cult and a Waco-like incident to explain Samantha's background; the extrapolation of the "war on drugs" and "war on terror" to a "war on science"; the paradox that sharing minds might promote individuality rather than "groupthink"; the battle between the government, as it attempts to suppress information released virally, and net users who labor to defeat the government's efforts.

And then there's the writing. Neem writes clear prose that, if not particularly lush, is well suited to the kind of story he tells. Action scenes are vivid and more imaginative than most thriller writers manage. Once the background is established, the pace is furious. A touch of melodrama in the ending is easy for forgive, as is a needlessly preachy epilog.

Nexus is intense, exciting, and thought-provoking. It's also fun.

RECOMMENDED

The Listeners by Harrison Demchick

Published by Bancroft Press on December 17, 2012

The Listeners is a new addition to the ever-expanding clutter of post-apocalyptic novels. The set-up is common: a plague leads to the quarantine of a New York City borough; within that borough, plague sufferers are behaving strangely. They get boils, the boils erupt, and they become creepy killers. It's not exactly a zombie apocalypse, but close enough.

Does the world need another zombie apocalypse novel? Probably not, but this one has some merit. After Daniel Raymond's mother disappears, he becomes one of many kids inside the quarantined area adopted by the Listeners, a group of one-eared men who consider themselves soldiers of destiny. They are led by a two-eared prophet who is aptly named Adam. The police have branded the Listeners as criminals, but Adam convinces Daniel that they are helpers, that the police are the real criminals. Either way, the Listeners are a cult. Daniel seems an unlikely candidate for cult membership, but Harrison Demchick seems to be making the point that cults thrive in extreme circumstances by preying on the lost and confused. In any event, the police and the Listeners are soon at war, and Daniel (whose close friend Katie is the daughter of a cop) is caught in the middle.

Various interludes and asides fill out the story. An advertising copywriter outside the quarantined zone, sensing that the end of the world is nigh, takes it into his head to start an ad campaign urging sinners to repent. He becomes, in short, God's ad man. A barfly named Roy blames a more successful barfly with Middle Eastern ancestry for the plague based solely on Roy's certainty that people from that part of the world are troublemakers. Tyrone, with his brother Anton, finds sanctuary with other survivors in a church, hoping to discover God's plan but instead finding a hidden exit from the borough. Other profiled characters include a nurse who shows up in Daniel's life and a reporter who is trapped inside the borough, forced to trade sex for food that the cops provide. Some of the interludes are more effective than others (the nurse's story of cowardice and greed is particularly strong); some are so disconnected from the main story that they act as unnecessary drags on the plot's momentum.

The misuse of power is the novel's central theme. The police declare martial law within the quarantined area (which, of course, they have no authority to do) and coerce citizens into surrendering their firearms at exactly the time they are most needed. The media report only what the police tell them, and the police are interested only in making themselves look good (while doing a bit of looting in their spare time).

While I enjoyed much of The Listeners and admired the immediacy of Demchick's prose, I found it difficult to understand what motivated the primary characters. We learn very little about Adam or about the origin of the Listeners. What we do learn comes as a plot twist late in the novel, but the explanation is incomplete and unsatisfying. Too many of the novel's events, in fact, are unaccompanied by a sensible explanation. Why, for instance, do plague sufferers have an aversion to babies? The concept of one-eared listeners makes little sense, but cults rarely make sense so I was willing to let that slide. Insofar as it involves Daniel, even the ending (for reasons I can't discuss without spoiling it) didn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe Demchick has a sequel in mind that will answer these questions, but as a stand-alone novel, I found the lack of information to be frustrating.

Daniel and his friend Katie are likable, but by making Daniel obsessed about his feelings for Katie, Demchick strives for a poignancy the novel never quite attains. The reader is meant to empathize with Daniel and to feel sorrow at the losses he experiences, but I was never able to convince myself of the story's reality and, for that reason, could never invest in Daniel's plight. I nonetheless give Demchick credit for making a valiant attempt at creating a zombie apocalypse novel with heart. He's a skillful writer, and I would love to see him focusing his talent on something meatier than a retread of a well-worn plot.

RECOMMENDED

Gray Matter by Shirley Kinnett

First published in 1996; published digitally by Open Road Media on October 30, 2012 

Gray Matter was first published in 1996, and like any story more than a couple of years old that depends upon computer technology, it seems dated. More problematic is that the lackluster story is too ordinary to stand out in the field of crime fiction.

The first chapter introduces a deranged killer named Dog -- that, at least, is the name used by one of his multiple personalities -- who believes he can acquire skills by eating the brains of people who possess those skills. The next chapter introduces Penelope "PJ" Gray, a psychologist newly hired by the St. Louis Police Department to lead the Computerized Homicide Investigations Project (which, despite the name, does not investigate computerized homicides). In addition to being a psychologist, PJ designs virtual reality software. She seems to think crimes can be solved by "recreating" them (i.e., speculating about how they occurred) using computer simulations. PJ is thrust into a homicide investigation on her first day on the job, alongside a washed-up detective named Leo Schultz who hasn't had a field assignment in years. Schultz doesn't understand how "all this cartoon stuff" will help solve the crime, making Schultz smarter than PJ. The cartoon stuff doesn't actually help them solve the crime, which made me wonder why it is the primary focus of the novel.

PJ is so busy trying to solve Dog's murders by playing with cartoons on her computer that she ignores obvious clues to the killer's identity. Schultz is just as inept. When PJ isn't playing with her computer, she and Shultz are too busy yammering about their tedious, unfulfilled lives to notice that the killer is right in front of them.

PJ's skill as a computer programmer struck me as unlikely but within the realm of possibility until she boasted of giving her program an "artificial intelligence" component that allowed it to "use its imagination" by filling in unknown events at the crime scene. If she could do that, she'd be teaching at MIT, not dogging away at a low rent job with the St. Louis Police Department.

Shirley Kennett's writing style is capable; it is the content that needs work. Some of the narrative is silly, like her description of a pickup truck as "red and arrogant and threatening, like the engorged penis of a rapist." Kennett seems a bit obsessed with penises; they are frequently in the thoughts of her characters.

The mundane background of PJ's life (divorced from cheating husband, sullen son who blames her for the divorce) shapes her lumpy personality. She spends much of the novel giving herself pity parties that I had no desire to attend. There's a touch of chick lit as PJ ponders the relationship potential of every man who ventures within her radar. PJ and Schultz both have troubled relationships with their sons that add nothing of interest to the story

The relationship between PJ and Schultz is filled with friction, but it all seems forced, in part because their exchange of dialog is so often unrealistic. Much of their bickering is gratuitous, clearly intended to give PJ a chance to show that she's a strong woman in a man's world. There would be nothing wrong with using that as a hook to establish PJ's personality if it were handled in a less contrived manner. Schultz's misogynistic nature is so outsized that he isn't credible. Schultz eventually gives a little speech about how police work sometimes makes him feel like he's lost a piece of his humanity -- a speech that is completely out of character and wholly unbelievable, inserted solely to generate sympathy for a character who is otherwise a bozo.

Notwithstanding the book's many flaws, the story has its virtues. It moves quickly and the concluding scenes create a modest amount of tension. Still, the ending is predictable and the book as a whole never shines.

NOT RECOMMENDED