The Samaritan by Stephen Besecker

Published by Bancroft Press on June 24, 2011

The Samaritan begins with an assassination.  As in many similar thrillers, the reader is given a lovingly detailed description of the assassin’s weapon and accessories, clothing, preparation, surroundings, breathing, patience, and discipline.  It is too familiar to constitute a promising start.

The assassination -- of a crime family boss -- takes place in the prologue.  The novel’s first section takes place before the assassination.  The set-up occurs in chapter two with the deaths of two upscale sisters who are drinking in a downscale bar in the Bronx.  When two young mobsters try to shake down the bartender, one of the women (a Broadway director) rather improbably starts the carnage by grabbing the mobster’s gun.  Her soon-to-be-dead sister turns out to be married to Kevin “Hatch” Easter, a CIA field operative the reader meets in chapter one.  Most of part one is about Hatch grieving his wife’s death and bonding with CIA hit man Gray Taylor.

Part two takes place after the assassination.  Predictably enough, more killings follow as a character identified only as “the hunter” orchestrates an unlikely plan to have all the bad guys in New York (mobsters and gang bangers and crooked cops) wage war against each other as part of a vendetta arising out of the sisters’ deaths.  The growing body count disturbs Hatch’s CIA boss who thinks Hatch might be behind it.  He asks Taylor to get involved.  The novel’s hook is the mystery of “the hunter’s” identity:  is it Hatch, or Hatch’s brother, or someone acting on Hatch’s behalf, or someone else entirely?  Stephen Besecker engages in the misdirection one would expect in a mystery/thriller, but doesn’t plant the kind of clues that would allow an astute reader to identify “the hunter.”  The mystery’s resolution is too nonsensical to be shocking, too contrived to have the impact that Besecker intended. 

Entirely too much of The Samaritan goes unexplained, probably because no plausible explanation could be concocted.  Besecker’s characters apparently have the ability to walk through walls; they enter secure areas undetected but we never see how they do it.  Nor do we learn how they are able to eavesdrop on both sides of encrypted conversations.  The CIA’s involvement in this mess is ludicrous, as is its supposed cooperation with another federal agency -- it just wouldn’t happen as Besecker describes it.  In fact, the novel begins with Hatch assigned to a mission that might be of interest to the Justice Department but not to the CIA.  The story circles back around to that mission in the last chapter without ever offering a credible explanation of the CIA’s involvement in it.  That’s just one of many instances in which the novel requires the reader to put common sense on hold and to ignore gaping plot holes.

The characters are equally difficult to believe.  Nearly every character in the novel is the TV version of the real thing.  The organized crime characters, from their nicknames to their speech and mannerisms, seem like second-string mobsters from The Sopranos.  Particularly fanciful is the CIA assassin who gets hit on by Mick Jagger’s girlfriend at Yoko Ono’s parties.  Some of this could be forgiven if the writing were of a higher quality, but this isn’t a novel you’ll want to seek out for its scintillating prose.  Besecker’s dialog is weak; except for the aforementioned mobsters, every character -- from cops to spies to hookers to dealers to Howie Long -- speaks in the same voice.  It’s never a believable voice.

The only positive I can cite is the novel’s pace.  It’s a quick, easy read.  For that reason, some readers will probably like it.  I didn’t and I can’t recommend it.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Next to Love by Ellen Feldman

Published by Spiegel & Grau on July 26, 2011

War stories cover familiar ground. Men go to war; some don't return. Those who don't die come back changed. Next to Love tells that story with a twist: its focus is not on the men who go to war but on the wives and lovers left behind. They furnish the novel's perspective on war's casualties: we see their reactions to husbands' deaths and to the erosion of the souls they once knew. The women in the novel are hard hit by war; dozens of the men in their town storm the beaches on D-Day and many die. As the book continues into the 1950s, the novel reflects postwar America in microcosm: the nascent civil rights movement, the baby boom, the displacement of women from the workforce and the blossoming of -- if not feminism -- a growing feeling of discontent on the part of women who are expected to make babies and martinis and leave everything else to men.

Babe Huggins grew up on the wrong side of a small town, about ninety miles from Boston. The nation has gone to war and women (including Babe's friends Grace and Millie) are marrying (and getting pregnant by) men who will soon return to battle. Babe is not married to Claude when she discovers the longstanding relationship between sex and war but she loves him and lives in fear of his death. Babe is an independent, unconventional thinker but she worries about how other women regard her. Knowing them to be hypocrites, she nonetheless judges herself by their standards and (rather unfairly) finds herself wanting. Her story --as it develops over the course of many years -- is one of pain that induces growth.

Millie and Grace have their own stories, yet as important as they are to the novel, the book belongs to Babe. Millie and Grace focus their lives on being good wives and mothers. They are not untouched by the exterior world (one experiences the indirect effects of religious prejudice, the other begins to question her new husband's true nature) but they are content to usher in the 1950s with its illusion of perfect families, stay-at-home moms, and devoted husbands. Only Babe seems to recognize that the national promise of equality for all Americans remains unfulfilled. Only Babe misses the role she played during the war, small though it was, when she held a job and believed in a cause. By the mid-1950s, Babe is "grieving for her own life ... she is, in some way she does not understand, broken."

The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that Ellen Feldman tries to cover too much ground in too few pages. Millie's story seems artificial, as if Feldman felt the need to dream up a problem for her so that she'd fit in with the other characters. Relatively late in the novel, Feldman gives stories to the children of Grace and Millie. Those stories feel unfinished, probably because the kids' lives are just beginning while the novel is nearing its end. The story surrounding Millie's son Jack contributes to the novel's themes while the one involving Grace's daughter Amy adds little.

To some extent, the novel is populated with stereotypes, or at least with characters we've seen many times before: the small town gossips; the man who resents every soldier who came home from the war in which his son died; the girl whose thoughts are elsewhere as she loses her virginity to a boy who is clearly using her. Occasional scenes are a bit overdone or clichéd (a discharged soldier hiding under a bed at the sound of celebratory gunfire was one) but those are rare. There are also times when the story lacks subtlety, as if Feldman felt the need to make a social evil as obvious as she could so it wouldn't escape the notice of dim readers.

Despite its flaws, this is a strong novel. Feldman writes movingly of grief. She writes perceptively of social change. Her prose is fluid and evocative. She tells an important story that is well worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

First published in the UK in 2010; published in the US by Grove Press on May 3, 2011

Walking to Hollywood is the kind of novel that usually annoys me: the writer is a character in the book, interacting with others who exist in the real world. Novels of that ilk usually come across as self-indulgent acts of conceit, no matter how self-deprecating the author manages to be. After a promising start, this one proved to be no exception.

Each of the novel's three sections portrays Will Self as suffering from a mental disorder. Self managed to win me over in the hilarious first section, in which his fictional alter-ego is obsessive-compulsive to a fault. Lost in Self's maddening prose, I never stopped being entertained for long enough to become annoyed. Among other coping strategies, Self takes photographs "to confirm that the world and I were continuing to coincide." The book reproduces photographs that (for the most part) correlate with the surrounding text -- very artful pictures to my admittedly untrained eye (the exception being the photo that showed way more of the male anatomy than I cared to see). I particularly liked Self's (presumably) fictional friend Sherman Oaks, a three foot tall artist who creates larger than life-size sculptures of his own body. All of this was quite funny and I would have been happy if the novel had ended there. Unfortunately, it didn't.

In the novel's second section, Self is psychotic. Self tells his therapist that he wants to write a book about "who killed film -- for film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age." His investigative methodology involves walking from LAX to Hollywood. Self often sees himself as playing a part in a movie -- in fact, through most of the book, he thinks he is a character being played by Pete Postlethwaite or (more to his liking) David Thewlis. Others seem to think so too. When Self visits his artistic friends, they are also being played by actors (Bret Easton Ellis is played by "mid-period Orson Welles"). Self decides that the walk should be filmed so a small crew accompanies him on his journey (or so he believes). A crew member, hearing that this was to be "a subversive take on Hollywood consisting of a continuous take of him walking around Los Angeles for a week," observes that "it wouldn't add up to anything." I can't summarize my reaction to the book any more succinctly than that.

Self uses the bulk of part two to make fun of Los Angeles (Hollywood in particular). Hollywood is such an easy and frequent target that it hardly seems worthy of Self's talent. In addition to all things Hollywood, Self's satire attaches itself to multiple, seemingly random targets, including Google employees, art, advertising, architecture, e-commerce, writers, and mobile phone users. There were times when I lost the story, or the story lost me ... times when I had to ask questions like "How did Scooby Doo and Daniel Craig enter into the story and why is everybody fighting?" While some of this is fun, Self tries too hard to be fashionable and witty; in those (too frequent) moments the novel becomes tedious, particularly when Self drops the names of the various actors, directors, and writers he knows, none of whom make an interesting contribution to the story. At other times the novel reads like the description of an acid-induced fantasy; some of those passages are funny, others are too strange or too nonsensical to register on my humor meter. From time to time Self seemed to be writing in-jokes for a crowd I have not been invited to join.

Part two ends after Self completes his trip to Hollywood. I was hoping part three would redeem the novel (at least partially) by restoring the magic of part one. Sadly, part three was only marginally better than part two. Self recognizes and even mocks his self-indulgence when he writes that he "remained sunk deep in my own solipsism" during his stroll through Hollywood. Failing to learn from this insight, Self's "morbid self-absorption" underlies part three just as deeply as it did part two (I didn't need to know, for instance, that espresso makes his bowels liquefy). This time he decides to take a forty mile hike on the Holderness coast. The trip is hampered by Self's frequent inability to remember who he is -- his disorder du jour is Alzheimer's. His descriptions of the local characters he encounters and his rendering of their accents provides an occasional chuckle but fails to rise to the comedic level established in part one. I struggled to finish and was grateful for the photographs that broke up the text and helped speed the way to the end.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Quest for Anna Klein by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 21, 2011

On behalf of a foreign affairs think tank, in the aftermath of 9/11, twenty-four-year-old Paul Crane agrees to interview ninety-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson Danforth in the belief that Danforth can provide insight into the terrorist attack. Crane is vexed by Danforth's failure to come quickly to the point of the meeting he requested. Instead, Danforth has a story to tell -- a story that begins in 1939 with Danforth's recruitment to "the Project." Point of view shifts frequently between Crane's first person account of the 2001 interview and the third person narration of Danforth's story (a story Danforth repeatedly describes as "a little parable").

Danforth's friend Clayton initially asks Danforth to volunteer his country home in Connecticut as a training ground for Anna Klein, a spy-to-be who speaks nine languages. In Connecticut, "a little steel ball of a fellow" named LaRoche teaches Anna to shoot a pistol and to use the destructive tools of sabotage. Clayton asks Danforth to learn more about Anna, to be sure of her loyalty. As Danforth spends more time with Anna, he comes to understand that he is terrified by the prospect of living an ordinary life. Despite Clayton's warning of the perils he might face, Danforth volunteers to accompany Anna to Europe and to assist her role in the Project, without yet knowing what the Project might be. Encouraged by Anna and caught up in his "lust to matter," Danforth realizes he wants to be more than "a little spy"; he wants to do something important. He also wants to be near Anna. As they travel together to France and then to Berlin, Danforth gradually learns of the Project's dangerous goal. But he also learns more about Anna ... and what he learns he will later unlearn, and relearn, and repeatedly question.

The Quest for Anna Klein turns out to be exactly that: Danforth's quest to understand Anna and to learn her fate. As he gains more information, both during and after the war, he realizes that she might not have been the person he judged her to be. There is an unusual love story in this novel as Danforth comes to feel "like a character in a Russian novel, love and death mingled in a darkly Slavic way." Yet as a reader would expect from an intricately plotted story of espionage, the love story isn't a simple one. Danforth is "doomed to live forever with the incurable affliction of having loved at a moment of supreme peril a woman of supreme mystery." It is a mystery that consumes his life. He is equally consumed by a desire for revenge, although the target of his revenge keeps changing.

Betrayal and loss of trust are the stuff of spy stories, but rarely are the deeply felt consequences of treachery portrayed as convincingly as they are in The Quest for Anna Klein. In many ways this novel is an eloquent story of nearly unbearable pain. The pain that flows from betrayal is palpable in Cook's characters but Danforth endures physical agony as well. Danforth's description of his experiences in Stalin's Russia after the war, including dehumanizing detentions in Lubyanka and a series of labor camps, are haunting. Working in the freezing winter, Danforth longs for summer; fighting mosquitoes in the summer, he aches for the return of winter. "Every blessing brings a curse," Danforth tells Crane, "even the gift of another day of life. Because you are already dead."

In a novel that layers intrigue upon intrigue, I expected to be surprised by the ending, but I was surprised by the surprise. Three surprises, actually, none of which I saw coming, all of which removed my reservations about the novel -- reservations I can't address without revealing the ending. If you read the novel and think part of its premise is unlikely, keep reading to the end. The book addresses timeless moral questions about the nature of innocence and accountability and vengeance, but in the end, it was the story that mattered to me. This is a skillfully plotted and well-executed novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

Published by Doubleday on June 14, 2011

Jamrach's Menagerie begins in a seedy nineteenth century London that is reminiscent of Dickens. Charles Jamrach is a dealer in wild animals. When one of his tigers escapes, ten-year-old Jaffy Brown pats it on its nose and winds up in the tiger's mouth. Fortunately for Jaffy, the tiger has recently eaten and is sated. Freed from the tiger's grasp, the uninjured Jaffy is deemed a natural with animals and is offered a job with Jamrach, where he befriends the slightly older Tim and his sister Ishbel. When Jaffy is sixteen, he and Tim join Jamrach's best supplier, Dan Rymer, who has been commissioned to capture a dragon-like creature called an Ora. To that end they sail away on a whaler and Jaffy's adventure begins.

A fellow with second sight warns Jaffy and the rest of the whaler's crew that they'll bring on bad luck if they capture the dragon and take it on board the ship. The crew should have listened. Time itself changes with the Ora on board; they enter "dragon time." Their thoughts become muddled; Jaffy says "It was like an earthquake in the landscape in my head, and I no longer knew what I could count on." In light of the warning, it's obvious that disaster will strike; it's just a question of when it will happen and how bad it will be. It's bad.

Carol Birch's vivid writing brings this thrilling story to life. Reading the novel is like watching a movie in high definition -- better than that, really, given the clarity that language provides. Birch's style alternates between graceful and gritty, as the scene demands. Part seafaring adventure, part survival story, part tale of the supernatural, with elements of a morality play and psychological study, Jamrach's Menagerie delivers an exhilarating plot and convincing characters. As the climax nears, the story's intensity heightens; at one point I was reading through half-closed eyes for fear of what might happen next. Parts of this novel have been done before (to some extent, the characters' interaction reminded me of my favorite short story, Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat") but I don't think it's ever been done quite like this. Jamrach's Menagerie is powerful, sometimes gut-wrenching, but also insightful. There are traces of a love story here and even a coming-of-age story, but ultimately deeper themes prevail as characters confront their fears and struggle with unimaginably serious moral choices.

Sensitive readers (and those who screen books before letting their children read them) should know that there is a fair amount of salty language in this novel. It's all appropriate to the story (angry or frightened sailors don't respond by saying "oh gosh"); I mention it only because some readers will want to know of its existence.

RECOMMENDED