The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Published by Doubleday on February 8, 2011

Comedy, like so many things, is a matter of taste: some people laugh at slapstick, some at dry wit, some at cross-dressing British comedians. Not everyone will find The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady funny. My sense of humor must mirror Elizabeth Stuckey-French's because I found myself smiling, chuckling, and often laughing out loud at her quirky characters and offbeat plot.

Its title notwithstanding, the novel is less about revenge than it is about a family dynamic -- yes, it's yet another story about a dysfunctional family. Ava (who loves Elvis and flirts with the notion of being the next America's Top Model) and Otis (who is trying to build a nuclear reactor in the tool shed) both have Asperger's syndrome. Their neurotic and depressed mother, Caroline, is nearly always in a foul mood, in part because she's approaching fifty and feels her best years (such as they were) are behind her. Caroline's husband, Vic, obsesses about hurricanes. Vic has detached himself from the family and has more than a passing interest in the parson's sister. Caroline's father, Wilson Spriggs, is a retired physician who suffers from Alzheimer's; having outlived his wife, he lives with Caroline's family. Only the middle child, Suzi, seems to meet societal expectations of normalcy (she's bright, beautiful, and popular), yet she gets herself into deeper trouble than her less advantaged siblings. While all of this sounds like the foundation for a tragedy rather than a comedy, laughter (as they say) is the best medicine, and Stuckey-French finds ample opportunity to inject humor into the family members' woeful lives.

The radioactive lady to whom the title refers is Marylou, who in 1953 became an unknowing participant in a government-financed experiment. While visiting a clinic for prenatal care, Marylou was given a drink containing radioactive isotopes as part of a study overseen by Dr. Spriggs. She attributes her daughter's death from childhood cancer to the radioactive liquid. It is for this that Marylou has vowed revenge and, having found Spriggs in Florida fifty-three years later, she plans to kill him -- or at least to disrupt the lives of his family members. I know, it still doesn't sound funny, but dark comedy is necessarily about dark subjects.

The main characters are recognizable (maybe even as members of our families) without becoming stereotypes. Some of the minor characters (like the lecherous pastor and his goth daughter) are a bit more formulaic, but they nonetheless seem real. The story moves quickly, reflecting a writing style that is comedic rather than literary. Despite its dark side, an underlying sweetness shines through. The novel teaches familiar but nonetheless worthwhile lessons: (1) vengeance, like radioactive particles, can spread in unexpected ways, touching innocent people and causing unforeseen effects; (2) forgiveness heals more effectively than revenge; (3) even if you can't be perfectly happy, perhaps you can be happy enough; and (4) we're all weird in our own ways. Sometimes the weirdness has a label: autistic, obsessive, neurotic. Other times it doesn't. "Some of us," Stuckey-French writes, "are more 'typical' than others, that's all."

Whether you read this novel for laughs or for its lighthearted life lessons, you're likely to be satisfied -- assuming your sense of humor is tickled by the story I've described. If it's not, this probably isn't the novel for you.

RECOMMENDED

The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 20, 2011

Bradford Morrow is an excellent writer, one whose style I greatly admire. In The Diviner's Tale, he brings a literary sensibility to what is essentially a genre novel ... although defining the genre is difficult. The Diviner's Tale is story of the supernatural that has elements of a thriller and the flavor of a family saga. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed Morrow's prose, I couldn't get excited about the story. The key problem, I think, is that the story is told in the first person by a narrator who has such a depressed, lackadaisical attitude toward life that her indifference rubs off on the reader.

Cassandra inherits the familial talent for divining, but when she foresees her brother's death, her father (without judgment) proclaims her a witch. Years later, Cassandra begins to doubt her own mind when, while walking a field in search of hidden water, she finds a dead girl hanging from a tree -- only to discover, when returning with the sheriff, that the body has vanished (and with it, all evidence of its existence). A series of creepy events unfold; Cassandra sees ominous people who could be real or imagined, living or dead, while receiving warnings (decidedly real) that she doesn't understand. She tries to hide for awhile, but how does one hide from visions (if that's what they are)? Eventually (roughly at the novel's midpoint) she decides to investigate. Several chapters later, the story evolves into a deeper mystery concerning missing children. While that development breathed some needed life into the story, it left me wondering why it took more than two hundred pages for that essential slice of drama to manifest itself.

Divining becomes a metaphor for seeing things that others can't -- not just underground water or dead people but troubled souls and hidden truths. One of the book's goals, I think, is to illustrate something that Cassandra says about her family: "All we had ever been were stories, and saying ourselves, unveiling our stories, was the best, the only, chance at divining ourselves." As Cassandra reflects upon her life, she discusses the sort of difficulties that regularly arise in lives both real and fictional -- illness and loss, abuse, uncertain relationships and unexpected pregnancy -- problems so familiar that Morrow's treatment of them here feels stale, as if we've heard it all before. Moreover, as the book begins to alternate Cassandra's unhappy memories with her problematic present, the memories tend to dominate the narrative -- an unfortunate choice on Morrow's part, since the present threat is much more intriguing than Cassandra's bleak past.

Ultimately, I found the story interesting but not compelling. The mystery that finally emerges isn't very mysterious. Some of the interaction between Cassandra and her children seemed forced, the dialog inauthentic. Despite the fact that Cassandra tells her story in the first person, it seems cold and distant, as if she is describing emotions she didn't actually feel. That made it difficult to connect with the narrative. Still, while I was less than captivated by the story, I found it easy to keep reading. Morrow's writing style kept my eyes moving from sentence to sentence, caught up in the graceful flow of words. The novel's doesn't have the kind of plot twist ending that thrillers and mysteries often deliver; that just isn't the kind of novel Morrow wanted to write. That's fine, but the lackluster ending didn't help the novel. This isn't a bad effort, but it's not my favorite Morrow.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Published by Minotaur on February 1, 2011

The Devotion of Suspect X is a different kind of crime novel. It isn't a whodunit: we learn in the opening pages that Yasuko kills her ex-husband, Togashi. Nor is the manner or motive of the killing a mystery: Togashi's aggressive behavior toward Yasuko and her daughter, and Yasuko's strangulation of Togashi with her daughter's assistance, are vividly described. For much of the novel, The Devotion of Suspect X seems like a police procedural combined with a detective story. The role of private detective is played by a physicist, Yukawa, who happens to be a good friend of the investigating police officer, Kusanagi. Yukawa also happens to be an old classmate of Yasuko's neighbor, a mathematician named Ishigami, who assisted Yasuko in the aftermath of the killing. Initially, the mystery surrounds the body that turns up days later -- with a pulped face and charred fingertips -- and whether Ishigami's scheme to keep the police from proving Yasuko's complicity will be successful. Yet about two-thirds of the way through the novel, the plot takes a sharp turn, and a new mystery emerges: Why is Suspect X doing something so completely unexpected?

I enjoyed The Devotion of Suspect X. Keigo Higashino's writing style (or perhaps the translator's) is straightforward; the prose doesn't soar but neither does it distract. The novel is tightly constructed; there's nothing in it that doesn't need to be there. Yasuko is a remarkably bland character (given that she's a killer) but the Buddha-like Ishigami and his friend Yukawa are interesting and their battle of wits brings the story to life. Ishigami's interaction with Kusanagi (another bland character) is less interesting but it serves to advance the plot.

The Devotion of Suspect X isn't a spectacular work of literature but it tells a good story. The plot unfolds rapidly and surprisingly. There is, ultimately, a mystery to unravel, and its solution completely floored me -- yet the author played fair: all the clues were there. The last couple of pages are a bit disappointing in that one of the characters behaves too predictably (probably the result of the author's desire to keep readers happy), but that gripe didn't overcome my generally positive feelings about the book.

RECOMMENDED

Someone's Watching by Sharon Potts

Published by Oceanview on February 7, 2011

Kate and Joanne are high school seniors who visit Miami for spring break. When they go missing, Kate's father travels to Miami to look for them, and also to see Robbie, the daughter he hasn't seen since she was seven. Now twenty-five, Robbie learns for the first time that she has a half-sister. Robbie initially wants nothing to do with her long-absent father, but after recognizing her own features in a photograph of Kate, she takes it upon herself to find her missing sister. Robbie's boyfriend Brett and ex-boyfriend Jeremy each play a part in the mystery of Kate's disappearance. Rounding out the cast are the owner of a trendy South Beach nightclub, a congressman, a writer whose husband is a politician, a female police detective, and an assortment of lowlifes. The engaging plot keeps Robbie and Jeremy in motion as they repeatedly encounter dead bodies (always in a way that makes Jeremy look like a suspect), while subplots address Robbie's indecision about which man she wants as a boyfriend and her ambivalent feelings about her father.

Jeremy apparently played a central role in Sharon Potts' first novel, In Their Blood. Someone's Watching makes occasional reference to the events in that book. Other characters from that novel (including Robbie) reappear in this one, but my impression is that the stories are only tangentially related. Although I haven't read In Their Blood, I don't think my understanding of this novel was diminished by not reading that book first.

While enjoyable, Someone's Watching is not without its flaws. To solve the mystery, Robbie draws conclusions that are not based on logic or even reasonable intuition (along the lines of "I found this shoe I've never seen before outside this house I've never visited before. It must be a clue!"). The plot depends upon several coincidences that stretch credibility well beyond its breaking point. Kate could easily remove herself from a nightmarish situation but implausibly fails to act. Robbie and Jeremy do some remarkably stupid things, equivalent to the slasher movie victims who decide to walk into the woods where people keep turning up dead. A subplot involving Robbie's estrangement from her father is unoriginal. The prose is sometimes a bit breathy for my taste, including sentences like: "Jeremy Stroeb. Why couldn't it have been forever?" Although this is billed as a suspense novel, it sometimes has the flavor of a chick lit romance. Some sentences seem to have been fashioned for a seventh grade reading level, like: "His words stung. They stung a lot." For the most part, however, Sharon Potts' writing style is capable and, fortunately, the story usually focuses on Robbie's search for her sister rather than her tiresome musings about her failed relationships.

Putting aside its credibility problems, Someone's Watching is entertaining. At some point the novel turns into a whodunit and Potts plays fair: although the villain's identity is less than obvious, the clues are all there. The pace is brisk. Robbie and Kate have well-honed personalities (the male characters, not so much). Had the writing been a bit more polished and had the story relied a bit less on coincidence, I would have recommended the novel without reservation. As it stands, I can only cautiously recommend it to thriller fans, particularly those who would welcome a bit of chick lit mixed in with the thrills.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dogfight, A Love Story by Matt Burgess

Published by Doubleday on September 21, 2010

Dogfight, A Love Story was a love story for me in this sense: I loved reading it. The novel is fresh, very funny, occasionally morbid, and always energetic. It is the product of a very talented writer. In its setting and characters it reminded me of Clockers (a book I greatly enjoyed) minus the cops and with added humor, but the writing in Dogfight is of a higher quality. Burgess' writing style is exactly right for a literary crime novel: sharp and zestful and evocative. The dramatic climax (coming just before an ending that is essentially an epilogue) is frenetic, explosive, intense: powerful stuff that made me utter an involuntary "wow."

Dogfight follows Alfredo Batista during the days before and after his brother Tariq (f/k/a Jose Jr.) is released from prison. While Tariq has been serving his sentence, Alfredo, a small time drug dealer in Queens, has taken up with Tariq's girlfriend, who is now pregnant with Alfredo's child. Worried about his brother's tendency toward violence, Alfredo wants to give him a homecoming present. To that end, he engineers a robbery from a Russian street dealer -- a poor decision that will soon lead to unexpected trouble. He also tries to arrange a dogfight, despite never having seen one (dogfights not being the competition of choice in Queens).

Matt Burgess does a masterful job of merging the plot-driven demands of genre fiction with the character-driven sensibility of literary fiction. Some readers won't like Alfredo or some of the other characters because they commit crimes. But even readers who generally want to read about morally pure characters might find Alfredo to be worth their time. He's imperfect (aren't we all?) but he isn't thuggish. Despite doing something during the novel's course for which he will probably never forgive himself, he has a conscience and he experiences some personal growth, if not full redemption, by the novel's end. In any event, all of the central characters in Dogfight have distinctive, fully realized personalities. It is easy to understand their actions even if the reader might disapprove of them. At least to me, they were all interesting, filled with credible emotions, self-doubt, yearnings, regrets -- all the stuff that makes us human.

Finally, lest you be alarmed by the title, be assured that no dogs were harmed in the writing of this novel. This is a work of fiction, after all. Speaking as someone whose best friend is a golden retriever, I can safely predict that most dog lovers will recognize that this novel does not glorify or glamorize dog fighting. Quite the opposite, in fact. Animal lovers should not avoid this excellent book because of its unfortunate title.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED