Author: Millard Kaufman

2010, McSweeney’s

Filed under: Literary, Mystery, Thriller

Misadventure is a terrific book. Its author, the late Millard Kaufman, was McSweeney’s's famous “boy novelist,” renowned for publishing his first novel, Bowl of Cherries, at 90.

While this is only his second novel, Kaufman’s been writing his whole life. He worked in 1950s Hollywood as a screenwriter, and it shows. Misadventure hovers somewhere between mystery and thriller—let’s call it “suspense”—and its tone and feel are reminiscent of Tinseltown’s Golden Age.

It’s a book that isn’t shy about having an intricate, twisting plot, but it still gets its drive from vivid characters and the way it dives headfirst into conflicts, one after another.

Jack Hopkins, a grousy young realtor, headlines the show, but he gets upstaged more than once, by a sleepy boss and his boorish son, by a rival’s eccentric (and possibly homicidal) ex-wife—virtually every character is a character, in the ’50s sense of the word. I won’t list more so as not to spoil their entrances.

As for the plot, I’ll tell you only as far as it took to get me hooked (don’t read the flap copy, it’ll spoil half the book). Jack gets sent out to see about selling a house for a Mrs. Norton, who’s secretly about to divorce her husband. Jack’s unhappy with his wife, and he’s immediately smitten by Mrs. Norton; he ends the meeting by asking her out. She says no. He responds:

What the hell, I thought. “We don’t have to have dinner,” I said. “But I want to sleep with you.”

They start an affair, immediately, in the house she wants to sell. Jack soon finds out that she’s not “Mrs. Norton,” she’s Mrs. Hunt, the wife of his biggest real estate rival. Then he finds out her husband beats her viciously, and she asks Jack to kill him. But then he meets Mr. Hunt:

One minute with Tod Hunt told me his wife was a mythmaker.

That’s just some of what happens in the first thirty pages. Throughout this rat-a-tat plot, the real dazzle comes from the writing itself, especially Jack’s rubbery, hardboiled voice, which manages to exude philosophy and spirit even as it always, always entertains.

Here’s an example of what should be a straightforward passage, turned captivating in Kaufman’s hands (and Jack’s voice). Gayle, Jack’s long-suffering wife, is reading a book in a tree. He’s feeling fond of her, and decides to climb:

I worked my way through the branches. They looked cool and inviting, the limbs of veined silver, the bark of velvet, the leaves as fragile and soft as fine linen.

A delusion and a snare. The trunk was full of sharp little warty protuberances which cut my hands. The boughs were pustulated with oozing sap. The foliage was coated with viscid dust. Why is it that trees, venerated by poets and peasants alike, are so fucking filthy? I made it, finally, to the side of my darling, to be greeted by an unruffled silence.

Everything in Misadventure happens like this, with verve and cynicism and wit, and a barging, entitled protagonist who’s not afraid to get mad at the illusions of the world, or the people that get in his way.

This book does suffer from a lackluster ending, and most of its depth comes from Jack’s little pronouncements about the world. But still, to the very end, it’s great fun watching Jack gallumph about, making his snap decisions about people (and often being wrong), watching him square off against everybody.

Jack (or maybe Kaufman) is kind of a drama dowsing rod: he goes straight for it, always and without dawdle. As it turns out, that makes for a pretty good novel.

So, once again, Misadventure is good. Read it.

Similar books: For another mystery that’s more about the prose, try Robert Coover’s Noir.

For another thoughtful, stylish book about a realtor—these two more thoughtful than suspenseful—read The Sportswriter or Independence Day, by Richard Ford (only in the second one is he a realtor, in the first one, not surprisingly, he’s a sportswriter).

This also reminded of Light House, by William Monahan, which is out of print but worth the trouble.

Author: Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

William Morrow, 2009

Filed under: Thrillers

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains a piece of information that you can find in the publisher’s description, but that the novel itself doesn’t reveal until nearly halfway though. If you want to read it fresh, skip this review and all others, and any descriptions of the book you might find. Don’t even Google “The Strain.” Just be warned: all that probably isn’t worth the effort.]

Guillermo del Toro is the famous director of Pan’s Labyrinth, among other movies. The style of this book feels appropriate coming from the mind of a director: it’s exhaustive and thorough, and contains a wealth of details about each character’s profession, personal life, and motivation.

For example, the opening sequence, in which a just-landed plane sits mysteriously powered-down and unresponsive on the tarmac, features sections from the points of view of an air traffic controller, a baggage handler, the captain of a fire truck, the head of the CDC’s “Canary” unit, and so on. Here’s an average sentence:

The maintenance crew was using an Arcair slice pack, an exothermic torch favored for disaster work not only because it was highly portable, but because it was also oxygen powered, using no hazardous secondary gases such as acetylene.

At first, this style succeeds in fleshing out the world and the events in it, but it quickly, quickly becomes boring. If this were a movie, somebody on the crew might need to know which slice pack the maintenance crew is using, or what the baggage handler is thinking as she drives up to the dead plane. But the audience does not need to know; even if they did, it would take seconds to communicate onscreen, instead of dozens of long pages.

Then there’s the big secret of what the book’s about: it’s about vampires. Del Toro and Hogan drag you through hundreds of pages of excruciating investigation, explanations of hemodialysis and human biology, and dozens of ancillary characters—all with their own little stories—just to reveal with a flourish the most cliched horror concept in existence. It’s disappointing, to say the least.

The confusing thing is that the authors treat the fact that this is a vampire book like a big plot twist, but it’s nearly impossible not to know that before you read it. At thestraintrilogy.com—yes, it will be a trilogy—the first two sentences of the introduction are: “They have always been here. Vampires.”

So if you put together what you know from the dust jacket and the first 50 pages, you figure out that the plot of this book will be simple: vampires attack, people defend. Once you know that, there are miserably few surprises left for you.

The only novelty that del Toro and Hogan bring to the table is their exhaustive research. An exterminator knows that “rodent urine shows up indigo blue under black light,” and we find out the capacity of the dead plane’s fuel tank. Obviously, they spent a lot of time finding these details, and they don’t want to skip out on a single one.

The downside of this is that they don’t prioritize the action or the drama of the novel over their precious details. For example, during one of the first vampire attacks, the CDC doc grabs a weapon to defend himself:

Eph searched around wildly for anything that would help him keep this guy away from him, finding only a trephine in a charger on a shelf. A trephine is a surgical instrument with a spinning cylindrical blade generally used for cutting open the human skull during autopsy.

That’s a bone saw. If you’re worried people won’t quite get it, you could specify “circular bone saw,” but that’s all we need, especially while someone’s being attacked by a monster. Giving that tedious explanation only takes the wind out of any tension the scene might have built: a dictionary definition doesn’t exactly go with wild searching.

The writing itself is pretty good for a thriller, except for when the authors reach for a poetic phrase and come up with something like, “Mark hung there like a bright white star of effulgent pain.” The dialogue is quite bad, and the characters, despite the effort spent on their backgrounds, are pretty two-dimensional.

The Strain’s big hook seems to be that it’s the anti-Twilight. The hype surrounding it focuses on the fact that these vampires are not nice, they’re mean. The problem is that they’re mean to an extent that they have no humanity—they’re monsters suffering from a disease, as the title implies. It’s difficult to pull drama out of a big mindless fight.

There’s talk that The Strain will be made into a TV show. That might fit better with the authors’ thought processes (assuming characters don’t run around wildly, explaining their bone saws and slice packs), but I have a feeling that won’t entirely alleviate the boredom.

From the novel version, there are two lessons to be learned. First, if you use a cliched monster villain like vampires, you have a lot of creative work to do to make it feel like you’re not cheating your readers. Second, an important talent for a storyteller is knowing which details to leave out.

In sum, with a lackluster “people fight vampires” plotline, and a ton of details weighing down the narrative, The Strain simply isn’t worth the time.

Similar books: for a CDC thriller, there’s Outbreak, by Michael Crichton; for a book that likewise treats its premise as a plot twist, there’s The City & The City, by China Mieville; and for vampires, there are thousands of other vampire novels.

Author: Sophie Littlefied

Minotaur Books, 2009

Filed under: Mystery, Thrillers

A Bad Day for Sorry is, at its core, a revenge fantasy about a woman who tracks down and punishes wife-beaters. It’s a righteous premise, and it’s entertaining in the way that wish fulfillment usually is.

Our heroine is Stella, the middle-aged owner of a sewing supply store. In her spare time, Stella helps battered women get peace and respite from the abusive men in their lives. She ties bad men up with bondage equipment, and does whatever needs doing in order to convince them to leave their women and never come back.

In Sorry, Stella hunts down one particular scumbag on behalf of a woman she barely knows. It’s a quick-reading and fairly entertaining story, but Stella’s detachment from the case at hand makes for a relatively tension-free narrative. She doesn’t really care all that much, and so it’s hard to care about her.

The woman at the center of the case is Chrissy Shaw, a friend of a friend of a friend of Stella’s. Chrissy’s husband, Roy Dean, kidnaps their infant son and takes off. There’s a bit of a mystery included as Stella follows a winding path to find Roy Dean, but the question at hand is never whether or not she’ll find him, only what she’ll do to him when she catches up.

The characters are not very complex. All the bad men, like Roy Dean, are wife-beaters and mafia henchmen and cold-blooded murderers. All the good men are noble and perfect and good-looking. Again, it’s wish fulfillment, and it makes sense to have clearly drawn teams. Littlefield’s prose is entertaining, if not dazzling, and it accomplishes what it sets out to do (though nothing was striking enough to quote for this review). There are some amusing moments, and some touching ones. But the plot is not very good, and, more importantly, there’s the problem of Stella’s motivation.

In the most compelling revenge stories I can think of (The Count of Monte Cristo and the movies Taken, Payback, and Oldboy come to mind), the formula is simple: an unjust act is committed against the hero, he is wronged so gut-wrenchingly that he does nothing but obsessively pursue revenge against the person who wronged him. That maniacal urge for revenge consumes him so completely that nothing else matters, and nothing will stop him, short of death. Depending on how deep the narrative gets, there might be questions of selfishness, sacrifice, guilt and innocence, and so forth. But the heart of the drama is always that burning need to right a personal wrong.

In Sorry, the wrong Stella tries to right is just not personal enough for her to be consumed by her quest. She got into the revenge-against-abusive-men business because of her own abusive husband Ollie, but she killed Ollie before the novel begins. After that, she’s never in any danger that she doesn’t seek out, and she could walk away at any time without any personal consequences. She doesn’t even like Chrissy in the beginning; the only thing tying them together is Stella’s vow to help any woman in need.

Now, I understand that those revenge movies I named all feature male heroes, and I certainly think there are and should be differences between the way men and women go about a thing like revenge. But the way Stella handles her business leaves a lot of tension on the table. She’s often bored by the case, and she can always take a moment away from it to fix her make-up or flirt with the sheriff. The bottom line is that Stella’s vague sense of noble purpose doesn’t translate to page-turning drama the way an all-consuming personal vendetta does.

Chrissy, on the other hand, blossoms somewhat and becomes the novel’s best character (that’s even her on the cover pictured above). In the face of a threat to her child, she turns from a ditzy trailer-park wife into an ass-kicking juggernaut. Unfortunately, there’s simply not enough of Chrissy in the story, and small doses of her passion can’t overcome Stella’s indifference.

Basically, Sorry is an OK book. It’s worth a read if you’re not expecting the nail-biting tension of a good mystery or thriller. If you’re looking for a light, sweet story and a touch of wife-beater revenge fantasy, you could do worse.

Similar reads: The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux, also deals with revenge. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is another book with a righteous premise that doesn’t really satisfy.

Edgar impact: A Bad Day for Sorry doesn’t have the tension needed to win an Edgar. With only one book left to review, Starvation Lake and The Weight of Silence are tied for the lead.

Author: Tim Gautreaux

Knopf, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Mystery, Thrillers

The Missing doesn’t quite know where to stand, genre-wise. On the one hand, there’s a bit of a mystery—a young girl is kidnapped in department store and the security guard on duty at the time, Sam Simoneaux, sets out to find her and get her back.

On the other hand, Gautreaux reveals by page 90 the culprits behind the kidnapping, and even the rednecks they paid to do the actual deed. That means the mystery is reduced to a yes/no question—will Sam find the girl or not?—and we still have 300 pages to get through.

I’m guessing, from those facts, that Gautreaux wants this to be a literary thriller, one of those “the true mystery is how it happens” books. It doesn’t work.

The story takes place in 1920s Louisiana and Mississippi, just after World War I. Gautreaux writes pretty good prose, among the best of the Edgar-nominated writers. He can turn a phrase, and the sound (as opposed to the content) of his dialogue is one of his strong suits.

Gautreaux also does great work describing the quality of life at this point in history. Most of the novel takes place on a rattletrap steamboat called the Ambassador, and you can almost feel her tacked-together deck boards creaking under your feet. For instance, this excellent description:

He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down—regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, … and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.

Unfortunately, that’s most of the novel: description. The steamboat has no part to play in the mystery, it’s just where Sam and the kidnapped child’s parents work. There are plenty of characters on the boat, and race relations to keep track of, jazz to enjoy. But none of it changes, and no drama ever develops.

Instead it just goes like this: everybody works hard on the boat. And then they’re tired. Passengers get drunk and start fights. Sam breaks them up. Then everybody’s tired. They play some music. Then everybody’s tired from working so hard. Since the boat never plays into the mystery at all—other than being a staging ground for Sam’s occasional investigative forays into the wilderness ashore—lifelike description can’t save us from severe monotony.

The same goes for the characters. Sam is more or less an automaton, blankly going through the motions of this case, not letting his emotions get in the way—ever. Sam would be passable as the hero of a real mystery, but when there’s no suspense and no case to really solve (even Sam knows everything by halfway through), he just doesn’t have enough personality to carry a novel.

Pacing is another problem, and Sam’s character starts taking wild swings as an excuse to stretch the story out for a few hundred more pages. Gautreaux also tries a late twist, which more or less falls flat, as it happens off-screen, and then we still have another hundred pages to wade through.

Too much of the time, we’re left with Sam tracking down people we already know. That sometimes reads (and always feels) like this:

“Can you tell me where Graysoner is?”

The chief steward looked at his face and winced. “Rough time last night. Graysoner the new man what replaced that old Jenkins boy with the broke leg?”

“No, it’s a town in Kentucky.”

“It’s a town.”

“That’s right.”

“Go see Mr. Check in the kitchen. He’s from Kentucky.”

Mr. Check, the head cook, was scraping down a stove top with a firebrick. “Naw, I ain’t from Kentucky. … The steward’s thinking of that Meldon feller who cooked for us two years gone. Go ask the captain. … ”

That goes on for about four times that length. Sam talks to a total of five people before he figures out where Graysoner is. It doesn’t provide any suspense, and Sam is too shallow a character to be compelling. We don’t get any insight into what he thinks about things, or what he’s learned about life (except the fact that he doesn’t believe in exacting revenge—he learned that when he was a baby and says it over and over and over).

As far as action, Gautreaux does OK. He sprinkles in scenes of brutality and handles well, and he often hits plot points in satisfying ways. The problem, again, is that those gut-wrenching scenes don’t change anything, and they don’t reveal anything new. They serve, by and large, merely to corroborate what we initially learned about the characters. If someone’s mean, he’ll be mean; if he hates shooting guns, he’ll hate it.

Ultimately there isn’t the perceptive interior life or the depth of character to drive a plotless literary novel, and there isn’t enough plot to drive a mystery. Sometimes these cross-genre projects work out; this time it didn’t.

Similar reads: Serena, by Ron Rash; Land of Marvels, by Barry Unsworth

Opposite read: The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford. It takes place over a weekend. Almost nothing happens, except a phenomenal depth of interior life. The sequel, Independence Day, won a Pulitzer.

Edgar impact: Somewhere between a literary novel and a mystery, The Missing is unsatisfying as either, though its prose is quite well crafted. Still, it’s tied for second with The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. Still in the lead is The Last Child.

Author:

2007, Mira

Filed Under: Horror, Romance, Chick Lit, Thrillers, Young Adult

I’m not sure I can say that I liked Stray. I wouldn’t read it again and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else (unless they were a werecat enthusiast, in which case I’m sure it would come to mind, and I would bring it up, and I would say, check this shit out). But I did read it in one week. Which says something.

First, a few fun facts about werecats:

1. Werecats have this amazing sense of smell. Lines including descriptions such as: “my citrus-scented pants” and “wholesome femininity layered with Herbal Essences and cherry Bubble Yum” really clue the reader in.  Over and over and over again
2. Werecats do not have nine lives. As the protagonist puts it, “that would be cool, though.” Maybe her werebabies will have that gene?
3. Good werecats don’t eat human flesh. Bad “strays” do.

Did I mention that I trash-picked this book from the trash? Yep. Found this gem on the side of the road. Look at the cover: You would have picked it up, too. There’s a sex kitten right on the cover and you wonder, is that a tattoo on her lower back, or a scratch mark?

I’m not always a fast reader. Sometimes I forget my book at home and end up spending the day with the Metro. Or I switch around, hopping from story to story.

One week says something. It says that I opted to read about werecat love triangles when I could have been out at the bar or catching up on my new favorite British teen drama, “Skins” or, you know, going to the library for a better book. It says that I remembered to bring it with me to work everyday so that I could read it on the train and on the elliptical machine at the gym. It says that I maybe hunted around my room for it late one night when it was hiding under my blankets and I really wanted to know whether or not the protagonist was going to be raped by the bad guy.

Was there a lot of character development? Not really.

There’s the main girl – you know the one. You want to be her when you grow up because she’s super tough, and clever, and all the mistakes she makes are adorable. Her name is Faith, but spelled, awkwardly, as “Faythe”. While the book is written from Faythe’s perspective, the reader never really knows what she’s going to do next. All this insight into her mind and still you’re surprised when she suddenly goes from hating her home life to leading the pack.

She also dresses like an uber-slut, but this is not exactly because she’s a whore. It’s because werecats are so used to seeing other werecats naked that halter tops are actually sexier to their kind than straight up nudity.

Faythe’s intelligence is illustrated in several scenes, but her depth is best summed up in the following passage:

Time was the great constant, eternally measuring my life in the ticks of a hundred second hands, the tocks of a thousand pendulums. It portioned my life into good times and bad times, the former too short, and the latter too long.

Other than the main girl, there are several guys she fucks/wants to fuck:  her college boyfriend, her high school sweetheart, this sexy guy named Jace. Plus the bad foreign guys (who are mostly “strays,” or cats that are not born into the weredom). Along with the were-boys, there are about a dozen family members and an even more extended werecat network (in wereworld, they refer to these extended pods as “Prides”). I got a little lost trying to keep track of who belonged to what family, but I did scan the pages trying to figure out who Faythe would finally choose to love.

Even with Faythe’s indecision regarding her next boyfriend, Stray is predictable. I mean, it’s a book about a mythological creature living among us and trying to save her people from the evil plans of similar creatures who are not as pure bred or morally strident. Guess what happens? Despite the predictability, it’s an entertaining, light read. It’s also a great for people who are interested in reading about things like disembowelment, intestines, and throat-ripping.

And there are moments in the book where some of the lines make no sense. For instance, someone, anyone, please explain the following excerpt to me:

Our eyes met. I have no idea what mine looked like, but his would have comfortably seated several little green men apiece.

I’m sure this book has spawned a series. The author left the ending nice and open for a sequel, or a prequel, or an entire series of similar ejaculations if she should chooses. However, unlike the Harry Potter books or the Twilight series, I don’t feel compelled to immediately go out and buy the next book. Because I don’t care what happens to Faythe next. Even worse, I bet a second book would follow the same plot lines and love choices. Yawn.

But then again, if I see it in another recycling bin outside, I’ll grab that shit right up.

Similar (But Better) Reads: The Twilight Saga (Meyer) & the Sookie Stackhouse series (Harris). For worse: http://paranormalromanceblog.com (“a harelquin romance blog devoted to paranormal love”).

Akashic Books, 2009

Filed Under: Thrillers, Short Stories, Mystery

The Boston Noir collection marks our fair city’s induction in the roving city-themed noir series, “Book Noir,” from Akashic Books. Already the series has seen collections from Brooklyn, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Phoenix, among others. Dennis Lehane is an obvious choice as editor -I’d be be hard-pressed to come up with a close second in terms of Boston crime novelists. He proves a smart choice, as well, and has put together a collection of noir stories as he defines them: working-class tragedies. In this collection, Lehane explores not only crime, or, as he calls it “skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people,” but explores what the Boston means to the people who live in, and more often just-outside, New England’s second-place city.

Authors in this collection range from immediately recognizable names like Stewart O’Nan and Dan Lee to writers like J. Itabari, who is making her fiction debut in the book. Lehane also included himself in the collection. An editor selecting him or herself for their own collection is usually frowned upon, but as a reader and writer of crime fiction Lehane realizes his omission from a collection of Boston noir would be a glaring one, and his story is a standout.

As any resident of Boston knows, the boundaries of our city are flexible, and extend far beyond downtown. Lehane places stories from the areas more Boston than the common: Southie, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain. But Lehane also traces the social geography our city’s inhabitants know well: the tribal locals, the mystified transplants, the wise-guys longing for the simple and brutal yesterday being erased by gentrification. He shows us the rough past of the north end in “Femme Sole”, a story set in 1745. The anger and confusion and guilt and shame revolving around the priest sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese is explored in all its complexity in John Dufresne’s “The Cross-Eyed Bear.” The commuter mentality is captured perfectly in Lynne Heitman’s story of a woman struggling to break through the glass ceiling in the financial district during the week and who spends her weekends far, far away.

In his intro to this collection Lehane sets himself an ambitious goal. “One of the recurrent themes of Noir has always been the search for a home,” Lehane writes. “Yet the home being searched for in these pages might be Boston, and the journey to find it -however fruitless that goal might turn out to be- is as rich and varied, as hilarious and sad, and ultimately as engaging as the city itself.” The worst of these stories are great noir tales in their own right that evoke the city in a paint-by-numbers fashion (throw in a Red Sox hat here, a view of the Prudential Center there, and, of course, a healthy amount of “wicked,” and your story is set in Boston). In the best, the city itself is acting upon the musician from New York now living in the Back Bay, or the single mother relocated to the suburbs, and becomes the unseen protagonist in the story.

The only fault I find with this collection is that despite the breadth of locations and characters, there seems to be an obvious omission. Lehane writes of the feeling of loss experienced in a “less violent and beiger city”, one being calmed and tamed by progress. Yet we are not presented stories seen from the side of the other. In a city with more students than pigeons, we never enter a campus—high school or college. The collection is free of entitled yuppies, another Boston mainstay. The “beigers” themselves, the affluent upwardly-mobile, the mid-thirties restaurateurs pushing into the south end, the hipsters painting murals over the graffiti in Somerville and Jamaica Plain, and the tourists being guided through the park by a man dressed as Ben Franklin are absent. The part of the city the locals roll their eyes at, but cannot disavow, is not represented. We don’t necessarily need a story to take place on a Mega Super Duck Tour, but it wouldn’t be Boston without hearing their ubiquitous quack.

The idea of setting as a major character in this collection interests me because so much of the idea of Noir is tied up in setting, from Chandler’s Los Angeles to the mean streets of New York. The Noir series has already mined some of the most obvious choices like The Bronx, Chicago, D.C., Havana, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, among others. Now, though, the series is dipping into territory that does not readily lend itself to noir fiction: Richmond, Pheonix, “Indian County,” Trinidad. Trinidad noir? I’m intrigued. Lehane suggests that noir is more than skuzzy people acting skuzzily, and as the series moves away from the more familiar locations I think we will see the definition of noir stretched in new ways. Delaware Noir? Maine Noir? Saskatchewan Noir? I don’t know what those collections would look like, but I can’t wait to find out.

Read these books: Nobody Move (Johnson), Inherent Vice (Pynchon), Shutter Island (Lehane), Moose Noir (Palin)

Author: J. Saunders Elmore

Three Rivers Press, 2009

Filed under: Thrillers, Mystery, Literary

Elmore’s epigraph for The Amateur American is from a John LeCarre novel. Pretty quickly, Elmore’s goal becomes clear: he wants to write a spy-ish thriller with an amateur protagonist.

Not a bad premise. Chuck is back for a second season, so I suppose people like the concept. OK, Chuck is an unfair comparison: Elmore’s a good writer with a funny, entertaining voice, and he creates some great characters.

But some pacing problems and the merging of the thriller narrative with a relatively ordinary young-man-abroad subplot keep this novel from living up to its potential.

Amateur is the story of a young American—Jeffrey Delanne—teaching in France. Against a backdrop of French political turmoil and Delanne’s adventures socializing with his various students, Delanne takes a job translating for an unsavory gangster. You can surmise from the prologue (a newspaper story from the future) that the gangster job will go bad quickly. It does, and soon enough Delanne is afraid for his life.

It’s quite entertaining, despite its predictability, until Elmore jacks up his stakes too quickly; once he goes into thriller mode, the novel becomes fairly monotonous. Since Delanne has no skills—since he’s an amateur—he doesn’t do much by himself. He mostly flails around, cooking up half-clever plans that don’t work out.

Perhaps this is a personal issue for me; I prefer protagonists that are very good at something facing foes that test their abilities. I don’t much care for stories about hapless pawns who rely on the mercy or incompetence of their friends or enemies to get by (even Chuck is good at something). I never found Delanne very sympathetic, especially after he quickly commits some pretty brutal acts on behalf of that gangster.

It also seems like Elmore had a lot of material about young men finding themselves abroad, and it shows up oddly in Delanne’s ruminations about girls, and his accounts of nights out and parties attended—in the spaces between the plot beats of a political thriller, such details seem… well, amateurish.

The ending isn’t great, but it does redeem the novel somewhat, as it showed that some of the novel’s flaws were in fact the result of conscious decisions on the author’s part and an attempt at a bold, unique plotline that Elmore executes well (if not particularly satisfyingly).

Elmore’s a writer worth keeping an eye on, but Amateur tries too hard to break the mold of the thriller novel, and doesn’t quite deliver the entertainment goods the way more formulaic thrillers do. And ultimately Delanne is too much of a hapless pawn for me to get behind.

Similar reads: Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts (really weird site, by the way); the Bourne books, by Robery Ludlum; and John LeCarre