Category: Reviews

DETECTIVE PALACE VERSUS ASTEROID MAIA
Ben H. Winters’ Award-Winning Last Policeman Novels

Congratulations to Ben H. Winters on the recent nomination of Countdown City, the second novel in the Last Policeman trilogy, for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award for science fiction! Last year, the first novel in the series won an Edgar for best original paperback in mystery and crime fiction. Both honors seem delightful to us, bright spots in a literary world where awards often go to novels that may be epic, meticulously crafted, relevant, or even stupefying, but not always… fun.

The Last Policeman books, so far, are fun!

As The Last Policeman opens in March, Detective Hank Palace is a cop’s cop, one of those rare men who rises each morning knowing exactly why he’s here. That virtue, however, is about to become irrelevant. Maia, a massive asteroid formerly known as 2011GV(sub 1), is predicted, with 100% certainty according to the mews media, to collide with Earth in October. Maia will probably not strike Hank’s home of Concord, New Hampshire dead-on, but her impact is predicted to eradicate life on earth as we know it. With 100% certainty. According to the news media.

Hank, like others around him, takes in this news with grave dismay as he is faced with yet another suicide investigation. But when he sees signs that foul play might have taken the life of Peter Zell, Hank never considers abandoning his job. Instead of rubber-stamping the file, he begins to ask questions. The answers, told over the course of a lively and tense story that’s peppered with wry humor, begin to reveal the rapid breakdown of human civilization in the growing shadow of Maia. What are the limits of human morality, and for what reasons will people resolve to break them?

In the background of the murder investigation, we learn that Hank has a sister, Nico. The two are bound by a tragic family history, driven apart by disparate natures. Nico is younger, quick and intuition-driven, while Hank is deliberate and circumspect. Nico has stepped to the fringes, along with a radical group that believes the Maia story is part of a government conspiracy. The asteroid’s path has been mischaracterized, or can be deflected. Hank rejects the movement–but what if they’re right?

As Countdown City opens, it is July. Maia’s impact is predicted to be less than 3 months away (yes, with 100% certainty). Greater questions arise. What are the limits of human fidelity, faith, and relationship, as civilization recedes into feudal mistrust? The formerly sophisticated global marketplace collapses into local bartering circles. The network of human labor abandons its posts on the power and technology grids. Small, tight communities war with each other for water, food and security. Nico’s faction, for instance, fashions itself as a scouting arm for the Free Republic, a group of students occupying the former University of New Hampshire campus. An escape community called The World of Tomorrow advertises its luxury mountain stronghold to frightened people of means.

The suicide trend has not abated, and Hank is faced with another disappearance. Was Brett Cavatone, ex-cop and devoted husband to Hank’s childhood friend Martha, a victim of foul play, or has he simply “gone bucket-list,” along with the millions of others who have run away to formerly forbidden loves, pleasures, missions, false promises of salvation?

Winters, who earned acclaim for the his spoof-classics Android Karenina and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, writes solid, entertaining crime fiction, infused with his own quirky perspective on the world. Hank Palace is a decent guy, a maddeningly dogged detective, the kind of hero that takes the case of a little boy’s missing toy sword as seriously as the case of a man gone bucket-list. He’s also human enough to fall in love, once or twice, and to maintain a fierce devotion to his only sister, despite the abysmal differences that drive them apart. And he’s unable to do less than his best, even when that is completely, humanly inadequate to prevent the end of the world. What more could anyone ask of a person?

Pick up both paperback originals for a satisfying pre-apocalyptic read, and join us in eagerly awaiting the final installment, World of Trouble, rumored for a summer release!

Fall in the North Atlantic U.S. is the perfect time and place to read Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach–over a long weekend, or a chapter at a time as the days shorten and the early evenings chase you to bed. This easy-paced yet structurally complex novel is laced with just enough bittersweet regret to perfectly complement the turning leaves. There’s plenty of action and intrigue here for thriller fans, yet also a thoughtful set of intertwining character journeys through relationship, football, haute cuisine, dance, 1970s nostalgia, (and yes, even some surprisingly decent sex) that will appeal to the more literary-leaning.

David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is a charming Princeton-bound high school football player who seems to have it all: golden good looks, devoted power-set parents, and a ticket to the Ivy League. He shares a pond in his Connecticut backyard with rock star Dabney Stryker-Stewart and his enchanting wife, the world-famous ballet dancer Sylphide.  His fiery sister, Kate, is both goddess and puzzle to him. When Lizard’s parents are murdered under suspicious circumstances, he and Kate experience a seismic shift that will drive them to seek answers for the rest of their lives. Roorbach weaves together decades’ worth of these larger-than-life personalities to uncover the secrets and foibles that might shed light on the double murder.

Lizard shares his love for good and wholesome food, down and dirty football, and brilliant, artistic women throughout with a charm that belies the trouble and grief driving his life. On occasion the ease with which he and his fellow characters fall into fame and prestigious positions comes across as unbelievable. Lizard follows up his tenure as a third-string quarterback for the Miami Dolphins in their heyday, for instance, with not one but two acclaimed gourmet restaurants, though his only training at cooking came from a long-term Southern girlfriend who taught him decent barbecue. His true love, Emily, rises to immediate fame as an international dance star under Sylphide’s tutelage–while Lizard gets his intimate turn, over the years, with both fabulous women.

But in portraying these lives in the spectacular way he does, Roorbach wisely taps into our delight with romantic and ambitious fantasy. He does it skillfully, too, engaging modern readers with modern issues and modern-seeming characters inhabiting a pop culture world of the past. He opts for a multi-cultural, multi-sexual, and even cross-gender cast of characters, keeping the dialogue highly entertaining as well as relevant in our world of ever-brightening awareness to global human issues, from gender consciousness to bad banks to Lizard’s foodie obsession with mushrooms.

Life Among Giants is a sprawling, fun, and rich novel, deserving of the praise it received on its release from both the New York Times and The Washington Post. Just like the season of fall–all this, and football too.

Wade into &Sons, the epic New York novel by David Gilbert, with both eyes open. For one thing, you don’t want to miss a single beautiful turn of phrase, and the characters’ portraits, with the possible exception of young Andy Dyer, who is simply a “likable bastard,” to quote the New York Times, are as close to flawlessly drawn as you will find. For another, it’s easy to lose the story in that lovely language. You have to pay attention. Except for the beauty of Gilbert’s prose, you may wonder why the novel fills over 400 pages. But much of this story, especially the portraits and the masterfully drawn New York tableaux, will stay with you long after you close the book: the mark of a good read.

&Sons, Gilbert’s second novel, revolves around the family of A.N. Dyer, known as Andrew, an aging celebrity novelist who appears modeled after several real-life curmudgeonly, reclusive writers of the last century. Most reviewers recall J.D. Salinger, but Dyer has been significantly more prolific, publishing 16 acclaimed novels spanning 30+ years. We meet Andrew at the funeral of his oldest friend, Charlie Topping, whose son, Philip, tells the tale. Andrew is in his twilight years. Andrew’s obsession, seemingly in response to Charlie’s death, is twofold: recreate the first draft of his seminal first novel, Ampersand, and recreate his family with a desperate call to sons Richard and Jamie for a reunion in New York City.

Andrew’s youngest son, Andy, only seventeen, is the delight of his eyes–and also, unfortunately, the child of an extramarital relationship, painted rather fantastically as the writer’s love affair with himself (the details which are one of the oddest surprises in the novel). Andy’s birth estranged Andrew from his wife and two older children, but it is the loyal Philip who is treated as an outsider, though he grew up alongside the Dyer boys. Philip has struggled all his life to understand why this should be so. In the wake of his father’s death, he pores over Andrew and Charlie’s lifelong mysterious and intimate correspondence, which seems to hold the key.

&Sons has been characterized by New York author Fran Lebowitz as “a New York novel written by an actual New Yorker.” If you add to this that Gilbert is a repeat New Yorker fiction writer, you will have an idea of the his level of artistry, and of the attitudes that direct his voice. Scenes such as Andy and his cousin Emmett pursuing a favorite pretzel vendor through Central Park, or a flirting girl texting Andy to find her near a nameless work of art in the Metropolitan Museum, define this novel’s world, as do scenes that take place outside of New York City. Reality filmmaker Jamie Dyer sojourning to a midnight country graveyard in Vermont, the resting place of his high school sweetheart, reformed drug addict Richard Dyer aping the attitudes of his adopted sun-drenched west-coast lifestyle, play up New York’s central role in this well-wrought world–no other place seems quite so real. The city is venerable, unapologetic, and grand, harboring lovely secrets like a nest of red-tailed hawks near Central Park, or the owner of a neighborhood burger joint who never forgets the face of an old customer, even when one returns as a tormented artist, or burnished with an L.A. tan.

Absolutely worth relishing the melange of character and evocative tableaux in &Sons, but don’t measure it too closely with your plot-mapper.