Gone Girl: A Novel

This book has been sitting at the top of the NY Times Bestseller list for a while, and since it was in my Kindle library and my wife and daughter read it, and recommended it, I took it on – and I wish I had not taken the time. On the one hand, this has been reviewed on Amazon more than 7,000 times and it has an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars. I did find a couple of 1 star Amazon reviews that I could agree with. First, I think it primarily plays to women, presenting the leading woman Amy Elliott Dunne as someone most women could or would like to identify with. She was 32 years old at the beginning, independently wealthy, and wondering why she had not yet found the right man to love her. There’s a romantic hook for the reader. Living in NYNY, she unexpectedly met a Missouri guy, Nick Dunne, who is handsome, personable, doing well in his career as a writer, and their chemistry is incredible. They marry, and the story really begins with Amy’s disappearance on their fifth anniversary.

The author takes us back and forth from one chapter to the next, from the alternate positions of Amy and Nick, a technique that I liked. The actual crimes are revealed late in the book, unlike so many crime stories that start out with the crime that must then be solved. This book is all about character development, and that’s where it fell short. The apparently normal Amy and Nick were anything but normal, and Amy turned out to be an incredible psychopath. I find it unbelievable that a woman with her psychopathology did not reveal any evidence of her dysfunction for the first couple years of the relationship. The author suggests that after having the best sex life in the world, that by their third year together, Amy was beginning to get moody, and then life intruded when both lost their jobs and Nick’s parents in Missouri went into simultaneous decline. By the end of their fifth year, after having moved to small town Missouri, they were hardly talking to each other, and then Amy’s bizarre plot to free herself of Nick was revealed. His response to his wife's disappearance was weird.

I found myself not believing that Amy could be real, and I’m pretty good at suspending reality as I read a lot of novels that I find overreaching but still enjoyable. And is it really possible that any husband who once discovered the extent of his wife’s deepest problems and ultimate crimes would choose to stay in a marriage? The peripheral characters like Amy’s parents and her best friend in Missouri were simply too shallow and too one-dimensional.

At the 91% mark, I was so disgusted with the whole plot and unbelievable characters that I put it down and asked my daughter about the conclusion. I have no interest in finishing this. I would give it 0 our of 5 stars, if we used such a rating system. In the Amazon reviews, there did seem to be universal disappointment in Flynn’s ending for this story, so how did it still get 4/5 by its readers. Oh, well. To each his own, and I’m not in agreement with the significant praise this book has received.

For one thing, it brings to mind the authors that I do like who have never received the recognition at the same level as Gillian Flynn, authors like Charlie Stella, Frank Tallis, Josh Bazell, and others. I guess, each to his own, and I have no intention of picking up another Flynn book.

The Lost Journal by Chris Blewitt

Arthur Layton has been moved into a nursing home and the process of closing up his Philly home falls on his grandson Seth. First task is set up for a garage sale. He gets everything priced and out to the driveway and yard leaving furniture inside. He forgot about the attic and checks it out. Amidst the mess, dust, and cobwebs his crawling around turns up a loose board under which is a small box with a key in it.

Two things happen at the sale. He scopes out Madison, a neighbor/bank mgr and there is this big black SUV parked across the street. Seth shows the key to Arthur who thought he'd lost it. It's a key to a safety deposit box so off they go to the bank that just happens to be the one run by Madison. And that SUV is out in the lot.

The contents of the box start the proverbial wild goose chase of clues to a long lost journal of George Washington. Seth, Madison, and Arthur follow clues to Constitution Hall, Valley Forge, Baltimore, and Mount Vernon (all the while being tracked by that SUV) trying to find out the contents of a document that people high in the governments of the US and UK want kept secret; a secret so damaging that both governments would resort to kidnapping or worse.

Think of this as National Treasure light - a decent history lesson that seems a bit short on heart. They keep finding little clues taking them closer and closer to the proverbial seats of power, finding some answer only having to keep silent about what he learned. It actually went pretty quickly, just that there were a number of leaps of faith and reasoning in the hunt, almost too easy. Overall, it was decent, just didn't have much meat to it. Blewitt also wrote that mystery set at The Masters recently reviewed by West Coast Don.

East Coast Don

Live by Night

Dennis Lehane has written 12 novels, at least three of which have been made into movies including Mystic River. He has done some scripts for The Wire, one of which won him an Edgar Award in 2007. I thought it was time to give him a look. Live by Night is a good read, his latest novel, published in 2012.

The novel takes during the Prohibition Era. Starting in 1926 Boston, the plot deals with mob characters, clean and dirty cops, and all aspects of booze running. The character development is excellent. The plot starts with the apparent end of the story when Joe Coughlin is about to be tossed into the ocean with his feet buried in concrete, and then the back story is told. Joe was a young hood, too smart to be doing petty crime according to two crime bosses who were in the midst of a territorial Boston war, Albert White and Tommaso Pescatore. Joe made the mistake of falling in love with White’s girlfriend, and that love haunted him over the course of the book. After being set up for an arrest after a bank heist and going to prison, Joe developed a long and trusting relationship with Pescatore, known as Maso. Once Maso and Joe were both out of prison, Joe proved his worth to Maso by developing an all-round successful crime network in Tampa. While brutal when he needed to be, Joe did not like to kill people and ran into trouble with his bosses when he found ways to accommodate the competition rather than eliminate it. In Tampa, Joe developed a relationship with Cubans, and eventually his influence extended to Havana. There are more fascinating subplots including the continued temperance movement despite the end of prohibition, and the powerful presence of the KKK in Tampa, people who were not happy about the presence of the very successful group of Italians, Hispanics, and Blacks, men who were crucial to Joe’s expanding enterprises.

There were a few moments when this book got a little slow, but not much since I read it over the course of a Sunday. I’ll be more than happy to turn pages in another Lehane book in the near future. 

Proof of Heaven

This book represents a rather distant departure from the crime novels we usually write about in this blog.

The author is a noted neurosurgeon with remarkable academic credentials, and due to an acute E. Coli meningitis, he spent seven days in a coma and had a near-death experience. The author, a man who had always been anchored in the sciences and had eschewed spirituality, had a profound spiritual experience arising out of this event in which his neocortex shut down for a length of time and more completely than most other patients with near death events. This book was Dr. Alexander’s attempt to rectify his prior lack of consideration of the spiritual side of life.

It’s a very good book, but it is not earth-shaking, spirit-rattling, or whatever expression one might choose, at least not from the perspective of one who has long thought about such matters. Part of the difficulty that Alexander has in attempting to write this book is language, but then he acknowledges that our language is too limited to allow a more complete or accurate description of phenomena that are essentially experienced in a nonverbal way. I think about Alexander and other authors efforts to describe spirituality much like the proverb about blind men who try to describe an elephant. One feels the trunk and likens the beast to a snake, another feels a leg and likens it to a tree, another the ear and thinks it is leaf-like, etc. Like the blind men, Alexander clearly gets a part of the spiritual experience which, as he says, is quite real and valid. However, does he get to the comprehensive wholeness of spirituality? Of course not. He gives the wonderful example of the futility of trying to describe unconditional love to others being like trying to write a novel with only half the alphabet. I agree with him, but he’s made an important attempt to write about unconditional love and spirituality.

Alexander, for the first time in his life, gets the “oneness” of our existence. I thought he made a curious although unconvincing argument for understanding the presence of evil in the world. He wrote, “Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth – no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be.” Much like the Dalai Lama, he talks about living with compassion and writes, “Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything.”

I thought it was a “straw man argument” when he wrote about scientists who are “pledged to the materialist worldview," scientists who insist that science and spirituality cannot coexist. I know some scientists who have easily made this bridge to spirituality, but that is far different than equating spirituality with a Western-like concept of God. The author described that prior to his coma, that he had spent four decades of his life in prestigious research institutions in which he was trying to understand the connections between the human brain and consciousness, and he was previously of the opinion that consciousness did not exist independently. It’s my thought that it was not that the value of his research and studies before the coma were invalid, just that his interpretation of the facts that he had come to learn about the brain were incomplete. He equate consciousness with spirit, and that is something I would never do since I think spirit and spirituality are so much more than just consciousness. As a psychoanalyst, it’s my opinion that there is an important role for unconscious thought processes in all of this – but this may be unnecessary hairsplitting with Dr. Alexander. Perhaps this is just another example of the inadequacy of our language to describe our connectedness to all things.

Near the end of his book is a beautiful poem about life and death, written in 1993 by David Romano called “When Tomorrow Starts Without Me.” Finding that poem alone was worth the time I spent reading Alexander’s book. Without question, Alexander’s book is a good read, a pretty fast read, and it’s a true story that shows that a nonspiritual and rigid-thinking scientist can evolve to a more inclusive understanding of his life.

Lost by E.G. Lewis

Three sets of main characters:

Dr. Dwarahanath Maheshwari (aka Derek), is a humble and a bit naïve university professor of theoretical physics in his native India. He’s managed to figure out how to cloak an object, but the funds for his research are scarce so a benefactor/defense contractor who sees the value of invisibility for the US military offers Derek the world if he’ll move to the US to continue his work.

Tom and Marty are empty nesters in rural Oregon. He used to be the business editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper and made the jump to a regional weekly where he and his family have thrived. He was sergeant in Vietnam and save the life of a platoon buddy who now lives off the grid in a cabin near Tom; he owes Tom a debt and will spend the rest of his life paying off that debt.

Claudia Monet is a former super model and face of a cosmetics conglomerate. Her first husband about destroyed the company. It’s take 3 or so years to get the company back on its feet and it’s time to expand so she proposes they get into the cruise business by launching 2 small luxury ships that sail the Pacific coast of Mexico and the Alaskan route.

Marty and a group of other women have this little singing group that plays hospitals, nursing homes, churches, and other local gigs. They get the chance to be shipboard entertainment on this small cruise ship headed on its last Alaskan cruise before the winter sends the ship on a southern route.

Derek’s research is progressing well at RCI and it’s time to test his method out on something of some mass. His equipment is placed on RCI’s research ship and aimed at an empty hull out in the Pacific. The successful test warrants some champagne and the CEO, a bit too tipsy for being around such equipment, triggers Derek’s process that is inadvertently pointed at a small ship in the distance – the cruise ship that Marty is on and is owned by Claudia’s company.

It works and now not only is a cruise ship missing but so are the 200 or so passengers. The process hasn't been tested on humans yet, so no one knows what's happened. Unfortunately, various issues prevent Derek from making the attempt at reversing the process. For all intents and purposes, the ship is lost at sea, even though in reality, it's still there, just invisible. Tom, Marty’s husband, had a premonition that this cruise was snake-bit and sets out to determine what happened and published a series of articles that blast Claudia's company; who else he is going to blame?

Derek is threatened by the RCI suits to not get to sanctimonious by going public and goes on the run. He looks online for stories of the ship’s vanishing and reads the news reports by this writer at an Oregon weekly, makes contact, arranges a meeting, and convinces Tom that if they act quickly, they can reverse the process and remove the cloak that surrounds the ship and strike a death blow to RCI, which is trying to keep their role out of the papers.

This book was in West Coast Don’s Kindle archive that he has allowed me to access. The first third of the book was, to me, an annoying development of the great love, devotion, and beauty of the principle characters. I know we read to eavesdrop on a world where we will never live, but I really got tired of just how great everyone else’s world was so much better than ours. Had this gone on for longer, I doubt I could've finish the book. Once the ship disappeared and the riddle was set up to be solved, the story picked up, not to breakneck speed, but better than the book’s opening. I read that the author has a continuing series based on the Claudia Monet character as well as a short series of Christian books. If I were grading books, this would be a C minus. I plodded through this because it was short. Any longer and I doubt I could’ve made the commitment to finish it.

East Coast Don

Hoover's Children

In what is far more than a crime novel, Tony Irons briefly traces the wild gene in two of his three main characters, siblings Sean and Gwyneth O’Neal to 120 years earlier when ancestor Mary Donnegad O’Neal, a new Irish immigrant, decided to have sex with a Cherokee Indian, starting a group that came to be known as the Black Irish. That rebellious trait was passed from generation to generation until the mid 1960s when the country was struggling with the war in Vietnam and significant social upheaval. Through remarkable twists of misfortune, the O’Neal siblings were manipulated by the FBI into joining the hunt for a list of people that the underground Weatherman were recruiting for their own anti-government activities. Behind the intrigue was J. Edgar Hoover, therefore the title, “Hoover’s Children.” Sean became a Special Forces guy in Vietnam and then an enforcer for the mob in Boston. When his sister was raped, he extracted the ultimate revenge against her assailant. That was the murder that allowed Hoover to demand certain misdeeds from both Sean and Gwyneth. Also brought into the story was Jack Duncan, younger brother of Dwight who was serving time in prison for his idealistic resistance to the Vietnam War. Dwight and Jack were both brilliant students who spent a lot of time writing poetry, revealing a charisma that drew others to resistance against the war. Hoover knew that Dwight, with contacts to the Black Panthers in prison, was making brother Jack the unwitting courier of the list which Hoover wanted to get at all costs.

As the plot unfolded, Irons skillfully took us through Israel, Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey. He captured the drug, flower power and self-important intellectual culture of the era while spinning great plot twists that I didn’t see coming.

Author Tony Irons is a very interesting guy, and some of this story is autobiographical. He dropped out of college, became a carpenter, taught himself architecture, and was recognized by Mayor Willie Brown in 2000 as City Architect of San Francisco. It was only after a stint at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard that Irons turned to creative writing and produced this book, his debut novel. This novel was recommended to be by a guy in Todos Santos, Baja Sur, Mexico where I have been spending some time, and Tony Irons wrote in the acknowledgements section of his book that there’s a Todos Santos writers’ group. If this book gives a hint into the quality of writing that will come from this group, or even if it just the beginning of a series of books from Irons, we have a lot to look forward to.