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Published: Feb 6, 2012
Category: Fiction
There are evenings when the invite to the duchess’s ball didn’t arrive and there’s nothing on TV, not even a black-and-white film on Turner Classics, and all you want to do is sit by the fire and whip through a book.
Not a heavy read. Not one of the hundred best books ever written. Something fun. And something fast --- start it tonight, finish it tonight. What Graham Greene called an “entertainment.”
In such a mood, I reached into the pile and pulled out the new Robert Harris thriller, “The Fear Index.” Harris is a favorite of the smart set. He wrote the novel that became the Roman Polanski film, The Ghost Writer. He also wrote “Fatherland” and “Enigma” and “Pompeii,” crowd-pleasers all.
“The Fear Index” is about a spectacularly rich scientist who has thrown low-paying brainwork over for an algorithm. Now his hedge fund makes crazy profits and he and his wife live in a fortress in Geneva. By temperament, he’s a publicity-adverse hermit; nobody gets near him. But then someone does --- an intruder walks through his elaborate security and assaults him. And that’s just the start of the weirdness; soon he’s getting packages that he seems to have bought (he didn’t) and moving money in and out of very private accounts (he didn’t know he had them). Clearly, somebody’s trying to drive him bonkers --- for starters.
A chilly, unsympathetic billionaire. An enemy gaslighting him by stages. Does the genius warm up? Does his tormentor reveal himself? Halfway through the book, neither had happened. Sadly, I closed the book --- “The Fear Index” is, for Harris, a rare dud.
On to “The Darlings,” a much-hyped first novel by Cristina Alger. Here I’m on home turf: the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And I know these people: the guy who’s in the 1% but just getting by, his racehorse wife, their fancy friends. And I have seen how people like this squeal like hot dogs at a weenie roast when their jobs vanish. But there’s a silver lining for suddenly beached Paul Ross; his father-in-law is Carter Darling. Yes, that Carter Darling, head of a legendary hedge fund. Thanks to the market collapse, his halo is tarnished --- and then there’s that looming government investigation. He could use an in-house lawyer. Why not Paul? [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
“The Darlings” drops all the right names and places. It avoids cliché. The plot moves right along. And yet I put it down --- reading about people who are cash-poor but have plenty of toys and real-estate, I want to shake them by their Zegna lapels and shout in their faces: “Downsize, you moron! And then shut the fuck up!”
In this state of agitation, I picked up a novel I knew almost nothing about by a writer unknown to me. John Colapinto’s “About the Author” is 250 pages long --- my preferred page limit. Still, it was clearly about a writer, and as we know, there is no deadlier topic. Still, I plunged in. Here is the first paragraph:
For reasons that will become obvious, I find it difficult to write about Stewart. Well, I find it difficult to write about anything, God knows. But Stewart presents special problems. Do I speak of him as I later came to know him, or as he appeared to me before I learned the truth, before I stripped away the mask of normalcy he hid behind? For so long he seemed nothing but a footnote to my life, a passing reference in what I had imagined would be the story of my swift rise to literary stardom. Today he not only haunts every line of this statement, but is, in a sense, its animating spirit, its reason for being.
Damn, that’s a good opening. And, very quickly, I knew all I needed to about the narrator, Cal Cunningham, and his roommate, Stewart Church. Cal has come to New York to write a great novel. He works at a bookstore like The Strand, seduces women as lost as he is, and, on Sunday mornings, shares the stories of his conquests with Stewart, his drab law school roommate. But does he write? In two years, not a word. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
And yet, by page 50, Cal has the town’s hottest agent, a book deal, a movie sale and a good table at Michael’s. His career is made. All he has to do is sit back and enjoy his overnight success. But there is something he must do (I’m not telling) and he has to go somewhere and do it (and he does it). But once he’s there, another opportunity presents itself. By now, you are screaming: “Don’t go through that door!” But he does. And then….
I know I’m being maddeningly vague. That’s because I really don’t want to spoil your pleasure of reading this funny, taut little book. A literary thriller? No, that’s too serious. More like a great “Law & Order” episode. Lots of twists and turns, a major plot shift at the half hour mark and tidy, but credible resolution.
More famous writers could learn a lot from John Colapinto.