Andrew Ladd reviews two thrillers about tortured men who insist on solving their own problems.
If you’re tired of Stieg Larson these days—or if, like me, you’re too cynical to give in to yet another conveniently serialized literary sensation—you will be pleased to hear that your girls need not have dragon tattoos in these last weeks of summer to provide a gripping reading experience.
In Karin Fossum’s newly translated psychological thriller Broken (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), for instance, the girl only has a heroin habit and a pair of oft-mentioned grey boots, and she still manages to pack such a punch that the book’s hapless protagonist, Alvar Eide, is left reeling and utterly—as the title suggests—broken.
Alvar isn’t exactly hapful to begin with, mind you. He stumbles through his dull, lonely life as a gallery attendant with a lack of adventure so pronounced it’s worthy of note in itself. He’s incapable of making any sort of decision beyond what meal-for-one to buy himself at the supermarket after work, uninterested in any sort of human contact beyond his customers at the gallery, and also, you begin to suspect, a forty-year-old virgin of the decidedly un-comedic type.
So it’s little wonder that when a teenage drug addict wanders into his life he is incapable of dealing with her in an intelligent or decisive manner—and so begins the psychological drama. With deft, mostly subtle strokes, Fossum tightly weaves Alvar’s innermost feelings into our own; very quickly we find ourselves screaming at him, exasperated, to just fucking get it together, already!—even when all he’s dithering over is whether or not to, say, buy a cat.
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By the time the shit really hits the fan—which it decidedly does, with an inevitability so wrenching it’s like watching one of those two-thousand-frames-per-second shots of a bullet shooting through an apple—the only person to whom the impending disaster isn’t clear is Alvar himself.
All of which is immensely readable, and, in general, skilfully carried off. The problem is, even with Alvar’s extensive dithering, the story’s action is really only enough to sustain a longish short story, and Fossum clearly knows it. But instead of accepting that reality, she pads out the material into a novel using a postmodern maguffin—one with some positive results, but also one that ultimately leaves me cold.
And this is it: the novel is actually about the author, or at least an avatar of the author, whose home (read: mind) has a constant line of prospective characters at the door; chapter one begins with Alvar jumping that line and forcing his way into her life—something of an irony given how spineless he is once the book gets started.
As an opening gambit that’s something I’d tolerate, but Alvar then returns to “Fossum’s” house almost every other chapter to discuss the story’s progress. This is where some of the characterization gets maddeningly direct—we’re awkwardly told that Alvar is a closeted homosexual, for instance—and yet even more maddening is how underused the device feels in these sections.
“Fossum” does, in fact, make Alvar a forty-year-old virgin, which you might rightly expect him to mention during their evening chats (along with dozens of other gratuitous backstory items)—except that he doesn’t. Instead these chats focus mainly on “Fossum” explaining how a writer doesn’t always know where her stories are going to take her, which I suppose is interesting if you’ve never thought about craft before, but frankly slows down the story with stale literary wisdom that I’d rather read about somewhere other than a thriller.
Still, I can’t completely condemn the presence of “Fossum”, because the real Fossum does, at least, use it to great effect in ratcheting up the tension as the book goes on: while it’s painful enough to watch Alvar struggle over every piddling decision in his life, it’s positively nail-biting to watch him do so beneath the multiple daggers “Fossum” hangs over his head during their evening fireside chats.
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In some ways, Thomas H. Cook’s The Last Talk With Lola Faye, another of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s thrillers this month ($25), is very similar to Broken: Cook’s story also feels better suited to a shorter piece, and is also padded out with an obtrusive device—countless lengthy flashbacks—that starts off feeling tiresome but ends up producing riveting returns that at least partly justify its presence.
Cook’s book also follows a tortured male protagonist who has spent most of his life alone, an historian from rural Alabama named Martin Lucas Paige.
Lucas differs from Alvar, though, in a crucial respect. While Alvar hems and haws so prolifically that he seems to have no control over his destiny, Lucas goes to great lengths in the opposite direction to keep everything very tightly in his grasp: not just his destiny, but his past, his present, and most certainly his readers.
We join him in St. Louis, where he’s giving a spottily attended talk about his latest book. Afterwards he’s approached by the eponymous Lola Faye, the woman who, during his childhood in Alabama, had an affair with his father; as if that weren’t traumatic enough, his father was subsequently killed in what was essentially a murder-suicide by Lola Faye’s estranged husband, Woody.
Lola Faye’s appearance after so long is, obviously, strange in itself, and what’s more she mysteriously insists upon returning to his hotel with him to “catch up”—on what, he’s not quite sure. The rest of the book then follows their evening in the hotel bar as they re-hash the details of everything that happened those many years ago.
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Cook writes mostly mysteries and he brings to bear his considerable talent and experience at doing so in spinning the saga of Lola Faye: there is copious foreshadowing to build tension, a masterfully slow drip-drop of details, and red herrings galore—so that the end result can very deservedly be called a page-turner. (That said, the tacked-on epilogue feels a bit like its saccharine counterpart at the end of the last Harry Potter—a series I did buy into—neatly wrapping up all the loose ends when a far more resonant ending comes simply at the end of the last chapter.)
In the rich interior landscape Cook writes for Lucas, he also provides a compelling portrait of a man dealing with his personal demons, both real and imagined—a portrait that is as convincing and often frustrating to read as Fossum’s Alvar, even though the two protagonists couldn’t be more different: while Alvar is unable to make any decision, Lucas is too stubbornly set on his first to see its sometimes awful consequences.
But in a way, both men actually deal with their problems in an extremely similar way: on their own. Sadly this is probably the most realistic aspect of both books’ characters, and the one that male readers, anyway, should take note of. Sometimes, the best way to get through the difficult times is simply to ask for help.
—Andrew Ladd