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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
October 9, 2014
First appeared in print in The Rhino Times, Greensboro, NC.
Thriller, Windows 10, Gamache, Adults
I don''t usually pick up books that are labeled as ""thrillers."" I wish I could say that this is
because I''m not easily thrilled, but the opposite is the case. If the writing is reasonably good,
I start to care way too much about the characters until I get way too tense and upset by the
jeopardy they''re in.
I''m not one of those guys who can go to a horror movie and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Even when I know I''m being jerked around ---- dread that comes only from the oogly-boogly
music, monsters or bad guys that pop up from out of frame ---- I care way too much.
Then I hate myself afterward, because when I''m not actually caught up in the moment, I can see
all the stupidity and manipulation. For instance, Stephen King''s most powerful book, Misery,
which I really admired, still had that really offensively dumb gag at the end where the dead
villain''s body isn''t where the hero left it ...
Oooooooh. I mean, come on.
And even the best thriller writers often resort to spatter scenes and torture scenes to up the fear
quotient or to make the book or movie stand out in memory.
Only ... I already have some pretty icky things in my memory, thanks. Don''t need somebody
else junking it up with more of man''s inhumanity to man. Especially not spectacular cruelty
that somebody sat around and thought up as entertainment.
And yet ... without people doing evil things, there would be little storytelling. As a fiction writer
myself, I''m keenly aware that I have written things that made other readers annoyed and upset.
When I do that, it''s because this is the story that felt important and truthful to me as I was
writing it; I have to give other writers the benefit of the doubt and assume that even the most
manipulative-seeming nonsense is there because the writer believed in and cared about the story.
I just don''t have to be in the audience for that story, or recommend it to my friends.
All of this is my way of telling you that when I do recommend a book labeled as a thriller, it''s
because it''s something special ---- in my opinion, anyway.
Those Who Wish Me Dead, by Michael Koryta, begins with a teenage boy,
Jace Wilson, who is trying to conquer his fear of heights by diving off ever-higher ledges at an old water-filled quarry. Things start to go wrong when he
discovers a murdered man whose body was recently sunk in the water. And
then the murderers come back, kill another victim, dump him ... and then
discover Jace''s clothes.
These killers really don''t like to leave witnesses.
The rest of the novel focuses on the effort to keep Jace alive. We get to know a
handful of characters, and Koryta does a good job of making them interesting
and believable.
Ethan Serbin and his wife, Allison, put on summer survival camps for troubled
teenage boys in the mountains of Montana near Yellowstone. Very much
against Allison''s judgment, Ethan agrees to include a boy whose life is in
danger and whose parents don''t want him in the witness-protection system
because the victims whose murders he witnessed were in witness protection
themselves. But the Serbins are not told which of the boys is the one in
danger.
Of course we know that the murderers will find out where he is and end up
pursuing him in the mountain country, so whatever Jace learns about
wilderness survival will be vital to him in trying to stay alive.
We also get to know Hannah Faber, who used to be part of an elite group of fire
fighters. After losing most of her team, she has returned to the much safer job
of watching for smoke from a fire tower. When Jace flees from the killers, he
turns to her for help; who else is out there in the forest?
Koryta plots a story that plays no tricks and works no miracles; that is,
everybody does things that you can believe real people might do. Some
pretty awful things happen, because the murderers are ruthless and cruel ----
a pair of brothers who have a weirdly fascinating way of talking only to each
other in front of the people they''re about to torture and kill.
Koryta does not indulge in extreme scenes of cruelty, though everybody has
different standards of what constitutes ""extreme."" If you have a lively
imagination you''ll fill in some unpleasant details that Koryta does not supply;
let''s just say that he does not seem to savor or dwell on the details of torture
and murder, the way some thriller writers do.
The Blackwell brothers are memorable, not because of the way they kill people,
but because of the way they talk and act.
They also have a way of anticipating any moves the heroes might make in
their own defense, so that their plans to get away or overpower them don''t
usually work out well. We start to count on a lightning storm or a forest fire
---- both of which are going on at the climax ---- to save the people we care
about.
But nature isn''t that much help, either. Not everybody we like gets out alive.
And yet it''s a completely satisfying and believable ending.
And for me, a reader who identifies so closely with well-drawn characters that
gruesome thrillers make me way too upset to stay to the end, Koryta shows
enough restraint that, while terrible things do happen to people and the bad
guys are disturbingly evil, I was never driven out of the book.
Those Who Wish Me Dead is such a good novel that I''m going to read another
thriller by Koryta and see if this was a fluke or if he delivers this well every
time. Meanwhile, I recommend this book highly ---- especially as narrated by
Robert Petkoff in the audiobook.
*
Microsoft tried getting away from sequential numbering after the disaster that
was Windows 4. Remember that? Windows 3.11 users heard the bad news
and waited to upgrade until the release of Windows 5 ---- which was not
numbered, but was instead called Windows XP.
Then Windows 6 was released, still with a name: Vista. It was the operating
system that made it clear that Microsoft thinks it owns our computers. We
hated it. We ignored it.
Vista was so bad they went back to numbering with Windows 7. Those of us
who upgraded directly from XP to 7 found it a decent upgrade path, as long as
you didn''t try to network XP machines with 7 machines. That did not go well.
Then came Windows 8. Once again, Microsoft''s even-numbered iteration was
an absurd disaster, as if, once again, everyone at Microsoft forgot that most of
us don''t have any desire to completely change the way we use our computers.
What were these weird solid-color ugly blocks doing on our screen? Was this
Tetris or an operating system?
Turns out that Microsoft thought that their captive Windows audience would
start buying Windows Phone if their regular computer had the same look-and-feel. Wrong again. Instead, we decided to reject Windows 8 exactly the way
most of us had rejected Windows Phone.
Now comes Windows 9 ---- you know, the user-friendly odd-numbered version
that follows the disaster of an arrogant, screw-the-user even-numbered
version. But once again they''re changing the naming system.
Now, instead of calling it Windows 9, they''re going to call it: Windows 10.
Yeah, that''s the ticket! Since Microsoft has decided that in the world of
Stupid they wish to be King, they are treating this as the last-ever version of
Windows (likely to be true no matter what they decide) and they wanted it to
have a more permanent-sounding name.
Never mind that all their even-numbered releases have been disasters. The
name of 9 is 10, that''s their decision, and as with the various naming
ventures of The Artist Formerly Known As ""The Artist Formerly Known As
''Prince,''"" the rest of us will just have to play along.
In a preview piece about Windows 10 on ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley wrote:
""Windows 7 users are among those Microsoft knows are key in winning over to
Windows 10. Belfiore said Microsoft's goal is to make Windows 7 users feel as
though they are upgrading from a Prius to a Tesla with Windows 10 without
having to relearn how to drive.""
{ You can read her whole article at http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-windows-10-whats-new-and-how-to-get-the-preview-bits-7000034210/?s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61 }
What a great idea. Let the upgrade path from 7 to 9 (AKA 10) be smooth and
easy.
So the question is: Why didn''t this brilliant notion occur to anybody at
Microsoft when they jerked us around with Windows 8? Why should the
upgrade from 7 to 9 be comfortable, but from 7 to 8 be brutal?
I think the dictatorial, user-hating ""upgrades"" to 4, 6 (Vista), and 8 show
Microsoft as it really is: The users will do whatever we decide, so screw ''em.
They never seem to remember that Windows is not MS-DOS. That prevailed
because it was the workalike to PC-DOS, which the IBM clones all had to run
in order to operate IBM-compatible software.
We switched to Windows 3.X because it was better ---- more Apple-like, able to
keep several programs running at the same time, and yet customizable as
Apple refuses to be.
For a long time, Windows was so popular that whatever Microsoft did, everyone
had to obey.
But now we''re getting choices. So moves like Windows 8 suggest that
Microsoft wants very, very badly to be out of the operating system business.
They want everybody to be running Android or Chrome machines, or some yet-to-be-named Windows replacement.
Thus the decision that Windows 10 will be the ""final"" version of Windows is
probably true. Microsoft''s corporate culture is obviously so defective, so cut
off from the real world of computer users, that they are no longer fit to
compete with companies that still remember that unhappy customers will leap
to a competitor as soon as a reasonable alternative comes along.
*
In this odd era of literature, we''ve fragmented the audience in some pretty
absurd ways. The academic-literary establishment is convinced that only
novels designed to be decoded according to their formulas count as
""literature,"" though of course anything that is written down to be read later is
literature.
For those of us who rarely find Li-Fi (literary fiction) to be readable or even
interesting, the literary marketplace is fragmented into departments, with
semi-permeable borders. Sci-Fi and Fantasy overlap too much to be separated,
as do Romance and Erotica (i.e., women''s porn).
Young Adult briefly became the All-Vampire-and-Werewolf section of the
bookstore, and is now separated into almost as many subgenres as adult
fiction.
Chick Lit tries to fudge the boundary between Li-Fi and Romance, but the best
of them are written in past tense and are therefore meant to be read by
volunteers. Still, it isn''t separated out of the mass of ""fiction and literature""
at the bookstore.
Historical Fiction is not separated out, so you have to search by known authors
(Bernard Cornwell, for instance). Oddly, though, most Historical Fiction now
shows up in a surprising place: Mystery/Thriller. Detective series now exist
that are set in ancient Rome, Medieval England, and every period of American
history.
There are also ""counterfactual"" historical novels in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section
---- they are set in a certain period of the past, but with a significant
difference. You know, the cowboys-and-aliens kind of thing; but some, notably
the work of Harry Turtledove, is deeply researched, so that you really do get the
immersive historical fiction experience even though things are flamboyantly
""wrong.""
Still, I think it''s significant that as Li-Fi has laid claim to the ""literature"" title,
some of our best writers have moved into the Mystery or Detective genre
in order to have the freedom to write clear, coherent fiction designed to tell a
story ---- even if they also want to do a different kind of literature.
One of the best novels I''ve read in recent years is Louise Penny''s A Rule
Against Murder, the most recent in her Chief Inspector Gamache series. I
have read none of the previous installments ... but I will now.
Armand Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, go to a resort in the wilderness of
Quebec to celebrate their anniversary. The Manoir Bellechasse looks rustic on
the outside, but it aspires to four-star cuisine and service, with a chef and a
maitre d'' who run a tight operation.
But the owner also operates the place as a haven for young wanderers who
get summer jobs there and learn the discipline of being part of a team devoted
to providing perfect service. Only a few choose to stay on for more than one
summer; but while they''re there, it''s a haven and place to find yourself.
It happens that during the same time as the Gamaches'' visit, the Finney family
shows up for a reunion. They are anglophones (English-speakers) of the social
class that used to dominate Quebec during the era when it was possible to
grow up in Montreal without learning any French.
But it soon becomes clear that there is a lot more going on with the Finneys
(or, as we soon discover, the Morrows, since the matriarch only became Mrs.
Finney when she remarried after the father''s death) than celebration. They
have a streak of viciousness that they use on each other and on strangers ----
including Gamache himself.
Of course there''s a murder ---- the most likeable of the family, perversely ----
and Gamache''s vacation is over as his team joins him from Montreal to
conduct the investigation. Naturally, suspicion is cast on the whole family ----
who have such a history of emotional neediness and cruelty that it begins to
seem miraculous that this is the first killing in the clan.
But Gamache''s biggest problem is figuring out how the murder was even done.
The victim was killed by being crushed under a heavy statue that fell from its
pedestal. But how was the heavy thing pushed off without the victim noticing
the equipment that would have been required? And why didn''t the movement
of the statue leave even the tiniest mark on the pedestal?
For those who like puzzle mysteries, this one is a doozy (I came very close to
the right answer). But if you don''t care about the puzzle, you can read this as
a serious novel about a family that has been working at cross-purposes for
generations.
Most of them are hungry for love, but can''t recognize it when it''s offered;
grudges are held for decades; and people who seem cold and hateful may
have reasons which, if they had only explained them, would have made all the
difference.
Meanwhile, the resort staff ---- a shy gardener, a rebellious young waiter, the
maitre d'', the chef, the owner ---- play a significant role.
Of course the mystery is solved ---- and fully explained, or I wouldn''t be
recommending the book. But this is so much more than a mystery that the
genre label is frustrating.
Yes, it is perfectly satisfying to readers who head to the Mystery/Thriller
section of the bookstore. But it would also be deeply pleasing to many readers
who wander the aisles of the Fiction/Literature section, wishing for a novel
about human relationships, but instead keep finding books by authors who
are more interested in impressing critics than telling a story.
Meanwhile, I must say that I''m especially delighted with the character of
Inspector Armand Gamache. His relationships with his wife and, by long-distance phone, with his son Daniel play a significant role in the story, and
Gamache''s character consists of a great deal more than the mere eccentricity
that he is profoundly afraid of heights.
I look forward to reading the other Inspector Gamache novels. Or rather,
listening to the superb readings by Ralph Cosham.
It''s a shame the language is coarse enough to be a barrier to some readers,
because otherwise the novel would be completely welcoming to readers with
traditional values. If you can overlook a few needless f-bombs, though, this is
what Agatha Christie''s novels have grown up to become.
*
By contrast, The Adults, by Alison Espach, is so riddled with foul language
that it becomes oppressive and then absurdly funny. But that''s far from being
the only barrier, because the entire book hinges on readers'' acceptance of a
sexual relationship between a high school teacher and one of his students.
That''s not really what the book is ""about,"" though, and despite the barriers, I
ended it feeling satisfied and even, to a degree, illuminated. Espach is a very
good storyteller, and The Adults is a powerful exploration of a fifteen-year-old
Emily Vidal''s gradual understanding of what adulthood means.
At first, adults are, to her, these alien creatures of her parents'' generation who
do inexplicable things. When she witnesses the suicide of the father of the
neighbor boy she has a crush on, it''s her first glimpse of the fact that adults
are every bit as fragile as children, but without anyone committed to
sheltering and supporting them.
Meanwhile, we watch the adolescent fantasies of Emily and her friends turn
real as the dreamy young teacher crosses the line. It''s a morally fraught
situation, especially since the novel treats it as a long-term love affair. On the
one hand, many societies in human history have regarded a marriage between
a fifteen-year-old girl and a twenty-four-year-old man as perfectly normal ----
even ideal.
And our rules can seem absurd: If a seventeen-year-old and sixteen-year-old,
or a nineteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have sex, no major crime has
been committed. But if an eighteen-year-old male has sex with a seventeen-year-old female, he can be tagged as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
We also live in the post-Clinton-Lewinsky era, in which it turns out to be OK
after all for a man in a position of vastly greater power than a young woman to
exploit her sexually without losing his job, and the professional feminists
are supportive and forgiving and agree that ""everybody lies about sex.""
But while sexual desire is always a powerful and understandable force in
human life, I found this liaison to be more like a drug addiction than a love
affair ---- and I think the author intended it that way.
In fact, it''s like the flip side of the coin of Twilight, in which the powerful
male is not trustworthy just because he''s so ""in love."" Whatever else the
novel says, it does not make this lopsided love affair ""romantic.""
Most important to the story, though, are Emily''s discoveries about her parents
and their generation of friends, as she moves into their world and finds she is
not any better than they were at managing the business of being an adult.
Despite the repellant features of the novel ---- or perhaps partly because of
them ---- I found listening to Tavia Gilbert''s fine reading of The Adults to be a
fascinating and moving experience. This is Alison Espach''s first novel; it
will be interesting to see where she goes with the next.
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