Targeted by Stephen Hunter

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on January 18, 2022

Targeted is a novel of extremist paranoia, a work of propaganda that pushes all the far-right buttons, from “they’re coming to take away our guns” to “fake news” invented by mainstream media reporters (one of whom is described as “vagina-faced”). After reading Game of Snipers, a decent thriller with a minimal injection of politics, I expected better from Stephen Hunter. My expectations weren’t worth the paper the book was printed on, particularly the paperless digital edition.

A congressional subcommittee made up of “leftists” in Washington is investigating Bob Lee Swagger because they don’t have anything more important to investigate. Maybe Hunter wrote this novel before January 6, 2021; maybe he means to distract from it. Ruled by an evil leader who is clearly a stand-in for Nancy Pelosi (variously referred to as “the crazy lady,” “dragon bitch,” and “Mother Death”), the “leftists” (including a Democrat identified as “the mewling baby man”) are out to get Bob Lee Swagger, not because of his silly name, but because he is a true American hero who loves guns and isn’t afraid to use them. Sigh.

The novel’s tired premise is that the left hates heroes who use guns and wants to hamper the efforts of patriotic cops who are just trying to protect American citizens from suspicious people with dark skin. What better strategy could the “leftists” concoct than to investigate Swagger and have him prosecuted with the expectation that police officers will be crippled by the fear of similar consequences and will never again use force to protect white people from the criminals who terrorize them? The investigation is supposedly based on Swagger’s use of “unauthorized ammunition” (Swagger’s special recipe), a charge that will hardly dissuade the police from using conventional ammunition. Sorry Hunter, but nobody on the left would be stupid enough to think this investigation makes sense. Prosecuting Swagger would make him the poster boy for the next Blue Lives Matter campaign. Who needs that?

In the real world, the Justice Department isn’t going to indict the man who (in the previous novel) saved Obama’s life (and was prepared to save Trump’s) from a terrorist sniper because he did so by using “unauthorized ammunition.” Nor would Democrats vote to investigate a war hero in a wheelchair. Nor would a judge allow the case to go forward, since shooting a killer with “unauthorized ammunition” as the killer is lining up a shot to take out an ex-president doesn’t remotely constitute wanton endangerment, which (at least as described here) isn’t even a federal crime. The idiotic concept of Targeted is jaw-dropping. It’s also ridiculous to think that cops would care whether Swagger is prosecuted for using ammunition that they don’t use, given that the prosecution of Derek Chauvin didn’t deter other cops from kneeling on the necks of unarmed suspects.

Swagger is insufferably self-righteous as he feigns humility. His philosophy is simple, to match his simple mind: liberals weak, rough man strong. Hunter portrays everyone on the left as ignorant because, unlike the virtuous Swagger, they couldn’t possibly understand the crucial distinction between a bullet and a cartridge. At several points, the novel suggests that education is useless unless it relates to guns and killing. Swagger’s poor grammar is apparently intended to convey that “book learning” don’t mean nothing compared to knowledge of firearms. Oddly, Swagger likes to read histories of war but his reading ain’t improved his grammar none. When he isn’t crafting Swagger’s dialog, Hunter at least manages to construct sentences with pain-free grammar. Gosh, did Hunter acquire a dangerous education somewhere?

The point of this novel is not to tell a realistic story. The point is to push the intended audience’s propaganda buttons by demonstrating how, consistent with the fevered imaginations of conservative extremists, “leftists” hate cops and guns. This isn’t a fair-minded discussion of whether cops should be screened for racism and sadism or whether guns should be regulated. It’s a full course red meat dinner for readers on the far right who live in a fact-free echo chamber, readers who believe that “rough men” who use violence to protect us all must be free from criticism when they turn their violence against people who are armed with nothing but dark skin. Swagger gives a tedious speech about the long line of “rough men” in his family who preceded him and how we all love them when we need them. Dull stretches of this dull novel even follow one of his ancestors in 1780, apparently to make the point that “rough men” have always been vital to American life. And perhaps to suggest that a facility with guns is hereditary.

This nuttiness takes up the first half of a slow-moving story. Hunter tries to pick up the pace in the second half by introducing Chechen prisoners who steal a prison bus and perform the miraculous task of crashing into an otherwise impregnable high school auditorium where the congressional subcommittee is holding a hearing on Swagger. Why are members of Congress convening in a high school auditorium in Boise? Well, they thought it would be wise to meet Swagger on his home turf rather than Washington. Seriously? The real reason is that prisoners can’t easily drive a stolen bus into the Capitol — only insurrectionists on foot can manage that invasion.

The Chechens terrorize the “soft” liberals and guess who comes riding to the rescue? Hint: he’s riding a wheelchair. In fact, he’s zip tied to the wheelchair and (spoiler alert) has apparently been stabbed to death, but that doesn’t stop him from fighting armed terrorists because righteous tough guys always prevail. Unlike all the rough men wannabes who regularly threaten Nancy Pelosi from their parents’ basements, the true patriot knows that his job is to protect women, even the ones for whom he feels contempt. Mind you, Swagger makes clear that he wouldn’t mind if Pelosi were killed, but he’s willing to sacrifice himself to “make a point,” which apparently has something to do with the moral superiority of rough men with guns.

Unfortunately, every time the novel seems to be moving forward, Hunter takes a break to give us another diatribe, in one instance imagining a New York Times reporter dictating policy to the government’s hostage team, insisting that they use no violence because “the day of the heroes is over” and lamenting that Swagger might ruin the story by doing something heroic. The Times reporter, of course, doesn’t know the difference between Utah and Idaho. At other times, Hunter pauses the action to show us how bureaucrats, unlike rough men with guns, can’t get anything done. Hunter even takes a shot at Stephen Colbert, mistaking the comedian for a “political analyst,” likely because Hunter has no sense of humor.

The simple-minded mentality of Targeted comes down to the superiority of Men With Guns to Men Without Guns — not just superiority at shooting guns and killing people (although those are the only things that really matter to the celebrated Rough Men), but superiority at all things: making policy, raising kids, teaching history to white children. They probably bake better brownies; you can’t go wrong with Men With Guns. Put them behind keyboards, however, and you can’t count on them to produce compelling fiction, unless you need loving descriptions of guns to make your day.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Patron Saint of Second Chances by Christine Simon

Published by Atria Books on April 12, 2022

Readers might find themselves yearning for a book that distracts them from the muddy reality of modern life, the kind of book in which a happy ending, however unlikely, is guaranteed. The Patron Saint of Second Chances is a charming story of the old world’s stubborn resistance to the new world’s encroachment. Eccentric characters populate Prometto, Italy, a sleepy village of 212 residents. Prometto is fortunate in that one of its residents leaves or dies when a new child is born, saving it the trouble of amending the population statistic on the village sign.

Giovannino Speranza is the mayor of Prometto. His wife inherited a hotel and he inherited his father’s vacuum cleaner repair business. The hotel has no guests because nobody has any reason to visit Prometto. A steady customer who regularly vacuums up Legos keeps Speranza in business.

Speranza is anguished by the apparent inevitability of the village’s demise, as the water authorities have given the village two months to replace its pipes (currently patched with bubble gum) before its water supply is shut off. Villagers are behind on their taxes and the village only has 200 euros, well short of the 70,000 required to make the repairs. The water authority will not authorize a payment plan because it is clear that Prometto will never have money.

Speranza is inspired after learning that a property owner in another village elevated local property values by spreading the rumor that George Clooney was about to buy a villa. The village economy went wild. Speranza attempts his own version of the scam by dropping the name of Dante Rinaldi, an Italian actor he’d never heard of until his adorning daughter talked about him. A rumor takes hold that the actor will be filming a movie in Prometto. Speranza only needs to find an investor to fund the movie and then divert the investment to pipe repairs. The fact that towns do not produce movies never occurs to Prometto’s residents, who have no experience in such things. Nor would they care, given the life that the rumor breathes into their dying village.

The village’s only wealthy resident, a butcher named Maestro, agrees to make a large investment in the movie, but only if one of his many sons will appear in the film. Speranza sees no choice but to simulate the filming of a movie to satisfy the investor.  One setback follows another as Speranza collects and loses money, always ending up short of the 70,000 the village needs to continue its existence. At some point, Speranza must confess to the village priest, who not only forgives Speranza but joins the scheme to save the village.

The Patron Saint of Second Chances is quirky, silly, and very funny. The story follows its own mad logic, making it easy to suspend disbelief in the unlikely plot. Speranza makes an enemy of Maestro, who keeps a wary eye on his investment, making a romance between Maestro’s son and Speranza’s daughter a Romeo and Juliet story. Another love story involves Smilzo, the only character who knows anything about making movies, and the woman he worships, who thinks she is playing the female lead and eagerly awaits the promised appearance of Rinaldi. An ongoing joke involving the world’s largest Pomeranian and the miniature schnauzers who harass him blends with another ongoing joke about real and simulated flatulence. What more could a reader ask from a comedy? The Patron Saint of Second Chances is just about perfect for readers who need an escape from the relentless crush of bad news.

RECOMMENDED

The Investigator by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 12, 2022

John Sandford has never been a friend to readers on the far right. Some readers made that clear in Amazon “reviews” of Lucas Davenport novels in which Davenport prevented the assassination of a female Democrat who was running for the presidency and tackled threats from white supremacists. The “reviews” portrayed Sandford as a propogandist for the far left despite his love of guns, the value he places on law enforcement, and his apolitical approach to p4otagonists. Readers who value thrillers that paint everyone from the Middle East as evil incarnate while pretending domestic threats only come from “antifa” will probably want to stay away from Sandford, notwithstanding (or because of) the political centrism he brings to his novels.

The Investigator is the first novel to star Letty Davenport. Letty is Lucas’ adopted daughter. She has many of Lucas’ traits. She loves guns and isn’t bothered when she kills people, although she doesn’t kill them indiscriminately. She’s not much interested in most people who don’t work for law enforcement. She’s really not fond of violent extremists.

Letty is working in an internship for a senator who assigns her to work as a Senate investigator attached to Homeland Security because of her unique skills, including her willingness to conduct searches for which the police would need a warrant. She works with a former Delta, now a Homeland Security agent, to track down a threat posed by multiple militias in Texas. The militia leader, Jane Jael Hawkes, has a problem with migrants. Hawkes' own militia sometimes kills “illegals” rather than helping the Border Patrol take them into custody. Now she’s purchased stolen C4 and has teamed up with other militias to do something nefarious. It is clear to the reader that the nefarious act will have something about a caravan that is moving through Mexico on its way to a town in Texas that might offer refugee status to the travelers. Hawkes and her followers brand any political leader who would allow refugees into the country as "traitors."

The Investigator is chilling because the story’s foundation is convincing. You only need to dive into the comment sections of any mainstream news site/blog to understand how many people in this country prefer lies to facts, bigotry to tolerance, and guns to reason. They blame everyone but themselves for their circumstances. While their complaints about “elites” or “rich people” might be founded in the real world, they expand their grievances to include powerless individuals, including migrants, who cause them no harm. The powerless are easier to threaten or beat or kill than the powerful corporate leaders who ship jobs overseas while convincing workers that unions will somehow make their miserable jobs worse. People harboring irrational grievances who believe problems can be solved with guns are easily manipulated. The Investigator illustrates how easily manipulation might lead to tragedy.

Sandford’s fans know that Lucas Davenport novels can be dark while Virgil Flowers novels tend to be a bit lighter. The Investigator is on the darker side. Sandford’s dialog is always characterized by characters taking friendly shots at each other. Letty and her DHS partner do the same as they bond, but that dialog offers the only humor in a novel that takes the threat of domestic terrorism seriously.

Letty’s initial investigation give the novel the feel of detective fiction. The story gradually transitions to an action novel as Letty and her Homeland Security sidekick, without any of the superhuman antics of tough guy thriller heroes, take on the militias that have invaded a Texas town. The combination of investigation and action has served Sandford well. It is particularly effective in The Investigator. High-octane action and smart plot combine to make The Investigator one of my favorite Sandford novels. Sandford can probably make any character carry a series, but Letty clearly has what it takes to star in future novels.

RECOMMENDED

Let's Not Do That Again by Grant Ginder

Published by ‎ Henry Holt and Co. on April 5, 2022

Let’s Not Do That Again is the story of a mother-daughter relationship that frays due to poor communication and mistaken beliefs. The family drama offers a typical reconciliation moment, followed by a dramatic moment that straddles the border between horrific crime fiction and dark comedy. A couple of romantic subplots round out the novel. One involves a senator’s gay son and an FBI agent. The other asks the recurring question: When two people in the early stages of love do something really awful together, will it bring them closer together or send them to separate prisons?

Nancy Harrison is a congressional representative who is running for a Senate seat. She won her husband’s seat in Congress after he died. During her Senate campaign, her daughter Greta drunkenly joins a French nationalist protest in the streets of Paris and hurls an empty champaign bottle through the window of everyone’s favorite overpriced restaurant. Greta has no interest in nationalism because, without immigration, the US would have no Italian food. Greta’s motive involves her animosity toward her mother, stoked by her paternal grandmother and by her sexual attraction to Xavier, a French nationalist whose project is to determine “how wholly corrosive love can be.”

Greta’s act of defiance is captured on a cellphone video. After it goes viral, Nancy’s political opposition accuses Greta of being a communist while branding Nancy as the world’s worst mother (something to do with “family values”). The novel is rooted in the unfortunate reality that attacking politicians based on the actions of their children is a thing now.

Nancy sends her son Nick to retrieve Greta from Paris. Nick is gay, has slept with most of the gay men in New York, and is close to Greta, having raised her while Nancy was making laws in Washington. Greta, whose issues with her mother are explained as the story marches forward, thinks Nancy is happy to have a gay son as a symbol of her progressive values. Nick, on the other hand, has spent his life cleaning up the messes made by Nancy and Greta. He’s getting sick of that role, leading the reader to wonder how he’ll respond to the final and biggest mess that comes near the novel’s end.

The other two characters of note are Nancy’s campaign manager Cate Alvarez and her co-worker Tom Cooper. They don’t benefit from the same character development as the Harrison family members, but they play an important role in the novel’s key event. How that event will affect their blossoming relationship is another question that the plot will need to address.

Let’s Not Do That Again is marketed as a comedy. The novel’s darkest moment is best viewed in that light. As a comedy, however, the story offers few laughs. There are elements of parody in the novel’s take on politics and privilege, and an ongoing joke about Nick’s attempt to base a musical on the life of Joan Didion is amusing. The novel’s humor is largely infused in Grant Ginder’s descriptive writing. Walls in a restaurant are “the color of radioactive egg yolks.” Greta refers to a co-worker at an Apple store as “annoying, the sort of person who couldn’t pick up on a hint if it had its hands around his balls.”

The novel is carefully constructed. Seemingly unimportant details in the early pages turn out to have significance. The novel’s lesson is the familiar stuff of light fiction — families are a mess but, in the end, we’re glad to have them. A less familiar lesson is that new beginnings and fresh starts are a myth. We can’t detach from a past that shaped us; we can only try to make sense of the past so that we can do better tomorrow. The novel’s most interesting question is whether it’s possible to live with the guilt of keeping secrets from those we love if revealing those secrets will harm others that we love. Maybe the novel’s lessons and questions aren’t profound, but the story that embodies them is entertaining.

RECOMMENDED

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

Published by Scribner on April 5, 2022

The Candy House is a novel of characters, some of whom first appeared in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Egan develops the characters and lets them loose to do as they please. Their stories never quite cohere into a plot but telling a story with a conventional plot does not appear to have been Jennifer Egan’s intent. Yet she acknowledges that “without a story, it’s all just information.” And so she tells stories, lots and lots of them.

The novel jumps around in time. Much of it takes place in the immediate future, although the fictional present includes technology that does not exist in our temporal reality. Backstories tend to date back to the 1990s with glimpses of memories formed in the 1960s. Stories also extend into the mid-2030s.

Egan uses her characters to explore themes of identity, affinity, authenticity, privacy, and the price of freedom. She primarily raises those concerns with technology that Bix Bouton invented in 2016. Own Your Unconscious allows people to externalize their consciousness to a Mandala Cube and revisit their memories. An advance in that technology soon allows memories to be uploaded anonymously to a Collective Consciousness (sort of a digital cloud for memories).

Collective memories are available to everyone who wants them. There is, of course, nothing anonymous about memory, as faces of individuals performing good or bad deeds are recognizable to those who dip into the collective. The technology allows crimes to be solved and reduces some versions of evil, but it also creates a new form of surveillance society and sparks a higher level of social paranoia.

Part of the story focuses on the idea of a vacant identity — an identity established on the internet and later abandoned, only to be reinhabited by a proxy (typically a bot) that uses clues to the originator’s personality to impersonate the creator. Some people vacate those identities to escape from a society based on data. The escapees are known as “eluders” because they strive to remain invisible to the digital world.

Since there is no overriding plot, readers might get of sense of whether The Candy House is their kind of book by learning something about the characters. There are too many to mention, but some stand out more than others.

A music producer and an anthropologist named Miranda Kline had two daughters. Miranda abandoned her daughters for a few years to study the “affinities” that make people like and trust each other. She developed “formulas for predicting human inclinations.” Miranda studied a closed, isolated society. She didn’t think her predictive formulas would work in a large society because people would be unwilling to supply all of the information that the formulas require. She didn’t anticipate the willingness of individuals to abandon their privacy, to live their lives in the spotlight of social media. (The potential consequence of documenting your life on social media is another of the novel’s themes.) A few years after Bix Bouton commercialized her ideas, a displeased Miranda eluded.

Rebecca Amari is obsessed with authenticity. So is Alfred Hollander. Alfred made a long, tedious documentary about geese because he viewed animal behavior as authentic. His next project involved screaming whenever he believed people were being phony to provoke authentic responses. Rebecca takes a more scholarly approach, but she is worried that any study of authenticity will become so wrapped up in “phony academic bullshit” that it will not attain the authenticity she seeks to understand.

Alfred’s brother Ames has a mysterious connection to the military. His brother Miles messed up his life in various ways before ending up in rehab and becoming a drug counselor. His cousin Sasha had a compulsion to steal before turning her life around and made a career by recycling trash into art. Visiting Sasha on impulse only accentuates Miles’ sense of failure. Miles describes his story as one of redemption because redemption stories have “narrative power.” Lucky for Miles, “America loves a sinner,” so he decides to enter politics.

Sasha’s husband Drew, a surgeon, has his own demons, living the memory of a friend’s drowning for which he holds himself responsible. Bix was in their company until they entered the river. Sasha and Drew’s son Lincoln is a counter. His world is about numbers, statistics, percentages. His work involves the detection of proxies posing as humans in social media. Outside of that realm, he is socially awkward. Lincoln is representative of individuals who think humans are less complicated when they are represented as data. One of the novel’s themes is the difference between impressionists and empiricists, the difference between those who “tend toward the romantic” and those who tend toward scientific detachment. One of the novel’s questions is whether it is possible for someone to be both at the same time.

A chapter narrated by Molly offers a funny take on the importance that teen girls place on being “in” with the right person, leading to a desperate jockeying for social status. Another chapter seems to be part of a future instruction manual for infiltrating and gathering intelligence about violent men. A chapter written as text messages became a bit wearying to read.

So that’s what The Candy House is. Individual stories, loosely bound by connections in the ways we are all connected — by family, acquaintance, interests, memories, and media. A lot happens during the course of the novel, including interesting events: an attempt to commit suicide by jumping from a hot air balloon; a potentially violent quarrel between neighbors about whether a fence post has been moved. Still, readers are unlikely to become attached to any character because, their stories having been told, the novel moves on to someone else. They might reappear in a memory or be mentioned as the relative of another character, but the novel is frustrating in its failure to follow the full lives of its most interesting characters. Rebecca Amari seems to be a central character before she becomes lost in the crowd. Bix Bouton is frequently mentioned but not often seen, although his son Gregory makes a late appearance. We learn what happened to Miranda but we don’t see it happen. Yet that’s life, and that might be Egan’s point. We drift in and out of each other’s lives. We might hear about someone we used to know, we might remember them, we might look them up on social media, but after our stories diverge, they might never rejoin. (On the other hand, I was happy to see the mystery of Ames’ military career resolved in the last chapter.)

Like characters, intriguing concepts (such as “vacant identities” and “proxies”) are introduced early in the story before they all but disappear. Other themes, including the perils of collective consciousness, show up more consistently. Gregory offers the most useful take in that regard. Gregory rejected his father’s Own Your Consciousness, viewing it as an existential threat to fiction. Gregory wants to be a writer but can’t finish his book after Bix dies. A visit in the 2030s with his former writing teacher leads to an epiphany. Gregory discovers that we don’t need technology to create a collective consciousness. Fiction does that by letting readers “roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.” Writers have the vision to see “a galaxy of human lives,” each “propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible,” a collective that hurtles toward the writer’s curiosity, each star in the galaxy an individual story for the writer to tell.

That might be Egan’s purpose — the selection of unique stars in the galaxy of human lives, showing how the characters or their stories relate to each other. Some of the stories are so evocative that may trigger, or become embedded within, the reader’s own memories. The book ends with a wonderful scene in which a kid playing baseball is confident that, while he has never hit a pitch in his life, each failure is an explainable aberration from the norm in which he always hits a home run. The kid’s story could be any story of self-delusion or self-confidence, the story of people who don’t let the past stop them from trying. It also reminds the reader that successes, like failures, are transitory; that there are always new challenges ahead; that past performance is no guarantee of future success or failure. The lesson I took from The Candy House is that the future keeps coming, that every person has a different future and an infinite number of potential futures, and that we shouldn’t be lost to the possibility of writing our own story.

RECOMMENDED