Keep Them in Suspense

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What is suspense? In the world of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction, it can seem like an all-purpose label for books that don’t fit the other, increasingly blurry categories. Know who the villain is?—not a mystery. Single narrator?—not a typical thriller. Bad things happening but not, technically, crimes?—not crime fiction. Occasionally, I’ve had to justify reviewing a book for the UK website CrimeFictionLover.com by saying something like “if you think it’s a crime for governments to deceive their citizens…” Not everything that’s a crime, writ large, is illegal. Just ask the fake news purveyors.

A few months ago Kathryn Schulz wrote an interesting New Yorker piece on suspense. “Like a lot of fun things,” she wrote, “suspense has a bad reputation,” and its detractors think of it as just a cheap trick to entertain “the masses” (like me!). A hundred-fifty years ago, when detective novels and mystery stories began to appear, they were criticized for merely appealing to curiosity, rather than offering nobler forms of fulfillment or ethical example.

I’ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes (complete works, 2 volumes, I’m on page 1052). It turns out The Great Detective provides not only suspense, but many ethical examples. Working outside the law enforcement apparatus, he relies on his personal sense of justice. And it doesn’t always entail turning a perpetrator over to the police, though in other situations, he does so gleefully.

The critiques are also misapplied, Schulz said, because almost every form of writing—excepting, she says, telephone directories and instruction manuals—makes use of suspense to captivate its readers. (I might disagree with her here, given some of the highly mysterious instruction manuals I’ve encountered for electronics manufactured abroad.) Shakespeare certainly deployed suspense to great effect. Will Othello kill Desdemona? Will Macbeth evade justice for slaying Duncan? Will Hamlet follow the order given by his father’s ghost? The late thriller writer Henning Mankell once said, “Every good story has a mystery in it.” I use that truism as the epigram for my own website.

Today’s descendants of the critics whose noses turned up at suspense 150 years ago today cluck over “genre fiction”—you know what that is. Mystery, romance, science fiction—in other words, the kinds of books people like to read. E.M. Forster, in noting that every fictional work must be built around a story, said that for a story to be effective, it must make readers want to know “what happens next.” That is, suspense.

While it might seem that withholding information is the key to creating suspense, Schulz points out that suspense also requires sharing information. A reader may not know what’s behind that door, but the writer has implied there are dark doings somewhere in the house; has shown the little boy’s fear; has made the rusty door handle hard to turn, but turn it he does … ever … so … slowly.

She cites Alfred Hitchcock’s example of a bomb going off in a crowded theater. The reader (or filmgoer) can know the bomb is there in advance, or not. How much more scary is it to know that the bomb is ticking away, while people blithely munch popcorn than it is to have a sudden loud Boom! and a lot of flying body parts and settling dust? Even knowing what will happen, we can feel excruciating suspense.

An excellent example of this is the new novel by Robert Harris, Precipice, set in 1914 on the very eve of World War I. He presents, verbatim, some of the hundreds [!] of love-letters UK Prime Minister H.H. Asquith wrote to young Venetia Stanley. Asquith hears the saber-rattling on the Continent, reads the desperate telegrams from diplomats in Russia and France, but can’t be distracted from his obsessive correspondence. Meanwhile, I was tearing my hair out! Because of the extreme suspense, waiting for the worst to happen, this book was one of the most gripping I’ve ever read (my review coming soon). I hope you wait for it with suspense—of the anticipation variety, not the dread kind.

Short Story Essentials

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Almost a year ago—how time flies!—the Central Virginia Chapter of Sisters in Crime organized a Zoom workshop on the ingredients of a great short story. They assembled a fine panel of presenters, too—Michael Bracken (well over a thousand short stories under his belt), Barb Goffman (recent winner of the Lifetime Achievement award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society), K.L. Murphy (Virginia native, novelist, and short story author) and Josh Pachter (not only a prolific writer—first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine at age 16—and anthology editor, but also an expert translator of others’ fiction).

In the piles of notes from the various seminars I Zoom in on are many intriguing insights. They often help me crystallize my own thoughts on a topic and, eventually, maybe, lead to a blog post for you. Here’s what I took away from this estimable group.

Among the most important things that a short story needs:

  • It needs a point. That’s what convinces readers the story was worth it; short stories that aspire to being literary often miss this, obscuring their vague purpose in high-flying prose. If you read the masters, like Chekhov and Gogol, the point is not only present, it’s significant. Yet it needn’t hit you over the head. It’s intrinsic. As George Saunders says, “I want my stories to move and change someone as much as these Russian stories have moved and changed me.” Dry, meandering modern stories will never achieve either impact or staying power.
  • It needs a strong ending, Goffman emphasized, which is what makes the point clear—again, even if not stated in so many words (actually, preferably if not spelled out). Trust your reader.
  • It needs believability. Even if it’s fantasy or about alien worlds, there must be a core of truth that the reader can invest in.
  • It needs strong characters, “right from the beginning,” said Murphy. She wants them to draw her in. Here’s an example: “‘Tell me the truth,’ Ruthie Ford said. ‘Why exactly did you come here?’” from John Floyd’s terrific story “Moonshine and Roses” in the Jul/Aug 2024 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You know something—something interesting—about both these characters in just those first lines.

When selected stories for an anthology, Pachter looks for reliable writers, ones who’ve withstood, as he said, “the test of time,” which I’m guessing in part reflects writers who follow guidelines, who can meet a deadline, who won’t send in a too-early draft that will require a lot of editing. Such problems can hold up an entire project. An anthology is a collaboration among points of view, but the editor has the Master POV, the overall conception of the project, so Pachter also looks for authors who are willing to be edited, or, as Goffman put it, who will “work with me.”

If there’s fact-based information, Pachter added, the author needs to get it right. I’ve read a two stories very recently (novels, actually), where the author didn’t seem to have a good handle on the world. I referred to one of them in a post yesterday about the top temperature humans can survive at. In another, a character was bragging about her 14-carat diamond engagement ring. Whoa. That would be heavy! Not something you would/could wear every day.

Asked to suggest a memorable short story, Murphy mentioned Goffman’s “Dear Emily Etiquette,” which is one of my favorites too. It appeared in the Sep/Oct 2020 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, winning the Agatha Award as well as the magazine’s annual Reader Award. Pachter is a fan of Stanley Ellin’s “The Specialty of the House,” which appeared in EQMM in 1948; you may remember the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television version from 1959. Bracken recommends John M. Floyd’s well-plotted stories: “twist, twist, twist,” he said. And Goffman is a fan of John Connolly’s “The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository” (2013), which won both Edgar and Anthony Awards.

For more, see the authors’ websites:
Michael Bracken
Barb Goffman
K.L. Murphy
Josh Pachter

Imaginations on Fire

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As news of the Southern California Line Fire explodes, another in a long line of catastrophes, authors have taken note. Fire’s destructiveness reveals heroism, and can equally well hide dastardly deeds. These thrillers have some strong points, and I also recommend the nonfiction Fire Weather by John Vaillant. You’ll discover real-life heroes (and villains) and understand fire’s dangers much better.

What Fire Brings
From the first pages of Rachel Howzell Hall’s new psychological thriller, What Fire Brings, Bailey Meadows’s situation is fraught with deception. This young Black woman has finagled a writing internship with noted thriller author Jack Beckham, but she isn’t a writer. She’s secretly working toward obtaining her private investigator’s license, and wants to use this opportunity to find out what happened to a woman who disappeared near Beckham’s Topanga Canyon property.

Topanga is a famously bohemian community west of Los Angeles whose hilly terrain and dense tree cover make it seem remote and wild. Thanks to Hall’s deft descriptions, the Canyon, with its one road in and one road out, becomes another potentially dangerous character here.

The story is told entirely from Bailey’s point of view. If you’ve read other works by Howzell, notably her debut, Land of Shadows, you won’t be surprised her narrative reads as if she is in an existential crisis. Living in two worlds makes her easily distracted—not the best headspace for conducting an investigation.

On a hike in the canyon, she sees a fire in the distance—too far away to pose any risk to the Beckham property, or is it? I read an advance reader copy of this book, which was labelled an ‘uncorrected proof.’ Typos will (presumably) be caught, and other changes may be made. However, when Bailey asks the fire chief about the maximum temperature a human body can tolerate, and he says 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s so wrong, I thought it was another intentional deception. The human body is about 60 percent water, which boils at 212 degrees F. Then he says higher temperatures are survivable “if there’s water around.” Water (humidity) actually worsens heat’s effects of heat on the body. This apparent slip-up is much more than a cosmetic problem, it affected my understanding of the plot.

That stumble aside, when you finally understand the whole of Bailey’s predicament, you may, like me, be struck by Hall’s accomplishment here. She turns the tables on some issues I didn’t realize were actually on the table. Despite Bailey’s annoying dithering, and the unanswered story questions (like, who was that old lady?), What Fire Brings is an exciting and memorable read.

Into the Flames
James Delargy’s incendiary new crime thriller, Into the Flames, like his previous two, is set in wildfire-prone rural southeastern Australia. Former Sydney police Detective Alex Kennard is making a heroic effort to reach the hilltop home of a missing artist—Tracy Hilmeyer—on one of the most threatened blocks in the rapidly burning fictional town of Rislake.

The superheated road surface pulls away as the tires of his commandeered Personnel Carrier labor up to the Hilmeyer house. Kennard doesn’t expect to find much at the house, certainly not what he does find—Tracy’s dead body, lying in a pool of blood. It takes superhuman cajoling to persuade the firefighters to concentrate on saving this one structure—now a crime scene—and to get the necessary investigating officers up the hill to the endangered dwelling. All the usual trappings of a murder investigation are here—coroner’s reports, paper trails, motor vehicle searches, warrants, interviews, development of suspects—all of which takes place amid an utter catastrophe.

Author Delargy is good at developing a complicated plot, red herrings and all. And, if you like a flat-out adventure, the story moves quickly from one event to the next. His writing style doesn’t lend itself to much character development, and he tends to tell you what his characters are feeling, rather than convey their motivations through more subtler means. As a result, I didn’t become really attached to any of them and to outright dislike a few.

What I did like was the dramatic set-up. The increasing number of devastating real-life wildfires around the world are a growing menace, and a story like this one vividly brings home the kinds of perils that such tragedies pose.

Order from Amazon here:
What Fire Brings
Into the Flames
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The Dark Side of The Movies

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It’s week four in our six-week zoom course on neo-noir cinema, a tour through a half-dozen of the best/most interesting/groundbreaking films in this genre, and we’re leaving bloody footprints in our wake. Having to watch a movie for “homework” is the best! So, you may wonder, what distinguishes neo-noir from plain old noir?

A few things, but as in all classification schemes involving creative endeavors, the edges blur a bit. The original noir genre includes black and white films produced mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. They involved a femme fatale, some mystery or crime or double-dealing, a hard-to-impress detective trying to work it out, and a lonely, jazzy trumpet. In fact, the sound track alone could send shivers up your back. If that didn’t, the cynicism would. Often urban. The top 5, says Rotten Tomatoes? Laura, Shadow of a Doubt, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, and Sunset Boulevard.

Neo-noir, then, is number one, more recent. These films are in living color, they often still involve a femme fatale, crime, a jaded detective/investigator, and some thematic music that may branch out a bit. The cynicism and double-dealing are still there, of course, and the violence is heightened.

So far we’ve seen The Conversation (1974), which was both more and less than I remembered. Gene Hackman is a professional eavesdropper who doesn’t like what he hears. You may mis-identify the femme fatale, and I could have done without the toilet that explodes in a bloodbath worthy of The Shining. I think that was a hallucination. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola with a fine, understated performance by John Cazale—reason enough to see it again. Not to mention a young Harrison Ford.

Next: Body Heat (1981).No question that Kathleen Turner is the femme fatale here or that the double-dealing involves her lover (William Hurt) and husband (Richard Crenna). Sexy stuff directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

The Coen Brothers first feature film, Blood Simple (1984) was next. Frances McDormand as the put-upon wife never realizes she’s a femme fatale, despite the body count evidence. The extent to which the characters misunderstand what’s going on has definite comic moments.

Last night we did our homework and watched L.A. Confidential (1997). It has it all, FF, crime, double-dealing, rampant cynicism, and appreciably more violence than the others. Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, and Guy Pearce are great as cops trying to figure out what side of the law they’re on. Directed by Curtis Hanson.

Two more to go!

Writing as Espionage

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As a new generation of excellent spy fiction writers emerges in the West, I took a sentimental look back at one of my American favorites—the late Charles McCarry, writer par excellence, former CIA man, and undercover operative in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I discovered an old interview with him and found great insights for authors of every genre.

In his first novel, The Miernik Dossier, published in 1973, he was already thinking about the challenges of being a novelist. Paul Christopher, protagonist of at least ten of his novels, says, “There is an artistry to what we are doing: spies are like novelists—except that spies use living people and real places to make their works of art.” In the interview, McCarry reiterated his view that there’s a striking similarity “between the creative process and tradecraft.”

The spy’s clandestine operation is the plot with almost inevitable twists and turns; agents are akin to stories’ protagonists; and the people they interact with are love interests, antagonists, and other sometimes disruptive characters. Authors often complain about their fictional characters not sticking to the plot—“minds of their own.” They go off the page, introduce unexpected complications, misbehave. Certainly, real-life people often don’t do what you expect or want them to, either.

A lot of story complications and their fallout emerge from below the writer’s conscious level. As a person who’s a “pantser”—that is I write by the seat of my pants, rather than with elaborate notes and outlines—I appreciate McCarry’s saying that, for him, writing remained a mystery, as with spying, where “I never quite understood what was going on.” I can relate. In my novel, Architect of Courage, there was a lot in there that I didn’t even realize until I was finished. “Oh, yeah. The subconscious mind at work again.”

McCarry created a character who was the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the book Shelley’s Heart. This fictional person turned out to be much more significant than McCarry expected. “Every morning when I sat down to write my 1,500 words, he would pull some other stunt.” Yet these actions were all perfectly logical in terms of where the plot and characters were going. Somewhere in a writer’s head, he believed, the brain must be assembling elements and figuring out how they work together.

One time in Kyoto, McCarry was in a Buddhist temple, trying to meditate, and discouraged that he couldn’t clear his mind and concentrate. The Zen master said something to this effect, “Don’t you realize that what those monks are trying to achieve is what you achieve every time you write a poem or a story? That is, the opening of consciousness.” Sliding open the doors between the conscious, the unconscious, and the subconscious, so that the work can be influenced by all three.

Acclaimed author Robert Olen Butler says you’re most likely to have access to the subconscious in the early morning while you’re still half-asleep! Before caffeine, the phone, and your analytic, goal-oriented mind take over. You can sometimes tell when a piece of writing was dominated by the author’s conscious mind—or as I think of it, their head not their heart. It may be logical, but it’s thin. It hurtles head-long toward a fixed goal (conclusion), when the characters clearly want to do something else. Artists in many fields talk about arriving at a trance-like state, when they’re deeply submerged in the creative process. Writers do too! In other words, basically, they make their “whole mind” work for them.

Recent espionage novels I’ve especially enjoyed:
The Translator by Harriet Crawley
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry
Moscow X by David McCloskey
All three novels by James Wolff that shatter spy stereotypes. The first: Beside the Syrian Sea.

The Serpent Dance

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With Sofia Slater’s latest crime mystery, you have not only an intriguing whodunnit, but, although it’s set in contemporary times, The Serpent Dance feels like a trip back in time to the era when Cornish midsummer revelries first involved bonfires, iconic music, river offerings, and the creation of wicker animals, later consumed by the ritual fire. Slater draws on the persistence of these ancient practices, mixing the traditional and the modern in ways that occasionally baffle her protagonist.

London graphic designer Audrey Delaney’s boyfriend of ten months, Noah, has planned a surprise getaway for them. She’s convinced herself (and prematurely told all her friends) that he’s taking her to Paris. When it turns out they’re headed to the fictional Cornish village of Trevennick, she tries not to show her disappointment, but Noah realizes he’s missed the mark.

From there, their situation goes from bad to much, much worse. Their B&B is a modern, glass-walled home overlooking the river. Inside, it’s open-plan carried to an extreme. Their landlady will be staying in the master bedroom, with just a wisp of separation between her and the guest bedroom.

Their hostess is a renowned television personality, and Noah takes to her with unexpected enthusiasm. Something isn’t right. Why this place? What’s Noah’s real agenda? Why his interest in this older woman? The twisting lines of the eponymous serpent dance itself can’t compare to the secrets Audrey is about to discover.

No need to worry be jealous of their hostess, though, because before morning she lies dead in a pool of blood, a knife to her throat. The police initially consider it a suicide, but elements of the crime scene simply don’t add up. Since Audrey and Noah are the only other people in the house, and since anyone else padding about could not do so without risking being seen (all those glass walls), police attention is on them. On Noah, particularly.

The town is preparing for the midsummer Golowan festivities, masks and wicker obby orses everywhere. It’s a deeply local tradition and outsiders aren’t especially welcome, especially when the shadow of murder has fallen on them.

Though Noah is tucked away in jail, their hostess’s isn’t the only body to turn up. Audrey tackles her predicament in the way she tries to work through any difficult circumstance, by drawing, and the realism of her depiction of Stella’s corpse, among other local characters is inevitably misunderstood. It’s a classic case of being out of one’s own element. This profoundly unsettling atmosphere makes Audrey anxious about the wrong things, so that she doesn’t recognize the danger to herself.

I found the mix of past and present, culture and calamity quite captivating. Nice job, Sofia Slater! Order your copy here.

Weekend Movie Pick: Coup!

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My ideal moviegoing situation is to know nothing, literally not one thing, about a movie before I see it. Too often, previews either show all best jokes (Thelma, a case in point) or set up impressions that don’t fit the actual film. Sadly, my preferred state of blissful ignorance is hard to achieve.

Thus, I was delighted to see Coup!, a dark comedy about which I knew nothing and had not detected any buzz, written and directed by Joseph Schuman and Austin Stark (trailer). The anxiety I felt in the first half-hour or so was strictly the result of the puzzling situation the characters were in, not any trailer-review-celluloid mismatch. So, in case you’re spoiler-averse like me, I should stop here, except to say, see it!

In case you do like a little info, however, I’ll say that it’s set on an island near New York City during the deadly 1919 Spanish Influenza pandemic. A wealthy family living in isolation on the island is determined that they won’t be among its victims. They’re living in perfect isolation. But hey, nothing’s perfect, is it? And, they need a new cook.

The man they hire we know is not who or what they think he is. Still, times are hard, the island is isolated (the ferries stop!) and there aren’t a lot of choices. The wealthy homeowner is a muckracking journalist and a hypocrite, sending editorial salvos toward President Wilson for not taking more drastic anti-influenza measures. He pretends to be facing the peril shoulder-to-shoulder with his brethren in the City, when really, he’s safely in his mansion, miles away. He, his lovely wife, and children are going it alone—that is, with their three servants and new cook. They’re vegetarian, its nearly winter, and when the markets close . . . well, life is hard and getting harder by the meal.

There’s a lightheartedness to their dire situation and the infectious smile of Peter Sarsgaard (the iconoclast cook) somehow makes everything better. Great acting all around The journalist is played by Billy Magnusson, and Sarah Gadon plays his wife. The maid (Skye P. Marshall) and chauffeur (Faran Tahir) gradually (and charmingly) get drawn into the cook’s schemes, and only the housekeeper (Kristine Nielsen) is onto him. Now, how to get rid of her? Hmmm.

I thought it was a lot of fun and, in light of our recent covid trials, provides some food for thought, too.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 78%; audiences: 94%.

Name Your Poison (actually, no, don’t)

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A thought-provoking presentation on poisons at last month’s conference of the Public Safety Writers Association reminded me of a blog post I’d written a while ago. Such a relief for a crime writer to get away from guns for a while—and don’t even talk about knives! The tagteam presentation by Janet Gregor and Gloria Casale prompted me to update my earlier post. Plus, it gives me a chance to use this painting of “Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners,” showing she didn’t let an opportunity to conduct scientific research go to waste.

A PBS documentary on poisonings begins: In 1922, 101 New Yorkers hanged themselves, 444 died in car accidents, 20 were crushed in elevators. There were 237 fatal shootings, and 34 stabbings. And that year, 997 New Yorkers died of poisoning.

Not all those deaths were intentional, it turns out. A century ago, life was full of poisoning hazards at work and at home. You may remember the below-stairs tour of cleaning products, rat poisons, polishes, and “remedies” in the movie Gosford Park, each one of which looked mighty suspicious when the master was murdered.

A major cause of death was carbon monoxide (CO), an odorless, tasteless gas that got into the air thanks to leaky stoves and gaslights piping. Even today, when houses are shut up tight for winter, we still hear about deaths from malfunctioning space heaters or, difficult to believe though this is, charcoal grills people roll inside to heat up the house. You may remember when seven members of a Minnesota family died of accidental CO poisoning in December 2021.The culprit? A faulty furnace.

apothecary bottles, poison

Still, poisonings are much rarer today than they used to be because in 1917 New York City hired Dr. Charles Norris to be the city’s (and the nation’s) first chief medical examiner. Norris, born into a wealthy family, was one of those larger-than-life characters who create their own weather. Norris, in turn, hired Alexander Gettler to head the City’s first toxicology laboratory. Gettler and his staff built the field of toxicology from scratch, and he and Norris created modern forensic science. CSI fans are grateful.

As they brought science to the analysis of murder victims, murder by poison became less and less feasible. A fun (!) read is The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. During his lifetime (120-63 BCE), Mithradates Eupator fought some of the most famous Roman generals, mostly successfully. At the height of his career, he governed 22 nations around the Black Sea and could speak all of their languages. And, he was an infamous poisoner. He believed that was how his mother murdered his father, so, to protect himself, he learned as much as he could about them.

One protection he engaged in was to take small doses of certain poisons every day to build up his tolerance. As a result, when Mithradates’ enemies gave him a lethal dose of something, it had no effect, which didn’t hurt his reputation for invincibility. He also developed a “universal antidote” to poison, still of scholarly interest. When the Romans finally captured Mithradates, he tried to commit suicide by poison, but his protection worked too well, and he was ultimately stabbed to death. Gardeners may recognize the King’s name: Eupatorium is a genus of flowering plant with several hundred species, including (and in my garden) Joe-Pye Weed. One of its species is, of course, poisonous to humans.

Much as Americans complain about “government regulations,” before the Food and Drug Administration took dangerous patent medicines off the drug store shelves in the 1920’s, and before there was a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and before the workplace safety rules that protect people like the poor young women who worked as radium dial-painters and died horribly of jaw and bone cancer, everyday life was full of deadly hazards, and mystery writers had one more handy tool in their store of potential mayhem-makers.

Want more?
12 Toxic Tales from National Geographic
The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor—fascinating!!
The Poison Artist fiction by Jonathan Moore – great use of the weapon

“Tell Me What You Think the Problem Is”

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French Windows by Antoine Laurain

This unconventional short novel by French author Antoine Laurain, translated into English by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, proves once again that delving into another person’s psyche is tricky business. You know from the cover that the book is a murder mystery, but what is this murder? When and where does it occur? And when the event finally appears in the story, the victim and perpetrator are a surprise. What the book has been up to in reaching that point is a trip through the richly imagined garden of a psychiatric patient’s mind.

Parisian psychiatrist Dr. J. Faber relates his encounters with a new patient, Nathalia Guitry, a beautiful young woman who is a successful photographer. But she’s stopped taking pictures. In fact, she says the last photograph she took was of a murder. Shocked, Faber ends the session. Nathalia returns for a second appointment and reveals that she spends her days observing the people in the flats opposite hers. Observing is what she’s good at, after all.

To get their conversations started, he suggests she write down what she thinks she’s seeing—the stories of these other people’s lives. He hopes her written words will be a window into her own thoughts. She agrees, and she writes interesting and clever stories from these other people’s points of view, which become chapters in the book. Some of these stories become so engaging, you may wish they weren’t so short. They also capture many aspects of daily life in Paris, deconstructing French people’s attitudes and preoccupations. I felt as if that apartment building revealed an entire world through its residents’ friendships, regrets, ambitions, and longings.

But what about that murder? You just have to wait for it

Order a copy here.

Jack & I

Laury Egan’sJack & I is the dark tale of a 16-year-old New Jersey boy growing up in a succession of foster homes offering varying degrees of sympathy and exploitation. Most of his problems result from undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder – what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder.

Sometimes, Jack is his painfully shy and socially inept self, but when his alter ego takes over he is brash, aggressive, and predatory. The unpredictable emergence of this other Jack (whom I’ll call Jack2 for this review) is one of the reasons foster families don’t keep him long. Egan states up-front that her depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder takes a few liberties for fiction’s purposes, but the condition usually originates in early childhood trauma. Jack has learned not just to seal off this trauma, he also hides the existence of Jack2. He has only fragmentary memories of Jack2’s misdeeds, and sometimes none at all, though he has to bear the punishment and social exclusion that result.

While Jack is a sympathetic character, Jack2 is not, and with a story involving the sexual exploitation of minors Jack and I is a difficult read. The depravity of the adults involved is shocking, but Jack2 is completely complicit and is disdainful of Jack, upon whom his whole existence depends. But don’t despair. At last, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

The previous book by Egan reviewed here, The Psychologist’s Shadow, also featured a significant psychological component, and the author handles these issues with great sensitivity.

Itʼs an extreme case study, yes, as well as a reminder of how badly the world treats the most vulnerable among us and how high the stakes are.

Order a copy here.

Weekend Movies? Fun, but not Must-Sees

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The Widow Clicquot

We liked the movie The Widow Clicquot, because, well—France, champagne, why not? You know, the orange label (trailer). The scenery was beautiful, and the film was directed by Thomas Q. Napper. Though the predictable plot didn’t break any new ground, it lulls you into a deep sense of enjoyment. In the early 1800s, the unexpectedly widowed Barbe-Nicole Clicquot (Haley Bennett) can either give up or resolve to implement the vision of her late, adored husband (Tom Sturridge) as to how a champagne winery should operate. The odds are against her.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences: 85%.

Thelma

It’s exhilarating to see June Squibb, as an irrepressible 93-year-old woman doing her thing, not to mention the last performance of the late Richard Roundtree (trailer). Both of them made the film worthwhile, though it was a little disappointing that director Josh Margolin didn’t stretch them beyond the predictable. In the story, grandma Thelma is bilked out of $10,000 by a scammer pretending to be her grandson (Fred Hechinger). How she resolves to get her money back and becomes a superannuated action hero to try, is the plot. I must say that, although there are comic moments, having seen most of them in multiple viewings of the film’s trailer, not much was left to discover! Parker Posey, as Thelma’s daughter, is a terrifying helicopter mom. But, if you’re feeling old and cranky, it’s a good one.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 99%; audiences: 83%.