Lee Child – Blue Moon (2019)
Paula Hawkins – The Girl on the Train (2015)
Delia Owens – Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)
My reader(s) knows that I read and review literary fiction recommended, primarily, by the New York Times book review staff – especially the books discussed on Pamela Paul’s podcast. Although reading these books provides some sense of accomplishment, many of the books leave me dry, as PJ Harvey would say. I find myself procrastinating and debating whether to finish a book. Note to self: you usually complete a book, even if you don’t like it, and in retrospect you should have followed your instinct to stop.
On a recent visit to one of the Fairfax County Library branches, I plucked three books from the “Staff Favorites” table. These books are bestsellers and are mentioned in everyday conversation.
These three books are mystery/thrillers. Each of them involve a love interest, a killing – and in Lee Child’s Blue Moon, many killings – and a mystery to be solved. Two of the three books were quite satisfying, with fast-moving action, while one was truly awful.
The most fun was Lee Child’s 2019 Blue Moon, featuring manly hero, Jack Reacher, taking on both sides of warring organized mob cartels in an unnamed Midwestern city. Child has written dozens of Jack Reacher novels, and Blue Moon is the latest iteration. Child makes it easy to jump in any time, since each novel is self-contained without the need to know of Reacher’s previous exploits. The book moves. Jack Reacher manages to kill at least one bad guy in each short chapter. It is amazing how Reacher can lay out a bad-ass dude with one bare-fisted punch. With two dozen bullets, Jack can kill two dozen armed cartel guys. The 45ish Reacher also manages to charm, without even trying, a good looking waitress half his age who has her own grudge against one of the mafia-like gangs.
Reacher is easy to like, because he is competent, unassuming, and unafraid. He is of no fixed abode and wanders into dangerous fights on behalf of good-hearted local strangers because it is the right thing to do. Child makes it fun by informing the reader of Reacher’s Army training for how to sleuth, or handle a gun, or calculate mortal risk in a nano-second. We learn how to best assess the odds of success when a man is pointing a handgun from 30 feet away, where to sit in a bar, how to question a bystander, and most fun, how to successfully escape overwhelming danger while maintaining a wry wit. He makes good friends, but is merciless to his enemies. When he is done, Reacher will ramble off to wherever the next Greyhound bus is heading for another adventure.
Sound corny? Perhaps, but it is fun and moves very fast. Reacher is an everyman hero and it feels satisfying for the good guy to overcome overwhelming obstacles to, violently, win. I’m in, and will soon reach for another Lee Child novel.
Not so much for the novel by Paula Hawkins. The Girl on the Train is one of the worst novels I’ve read. It is a book my inner voice told me, often, to abandon, but I persevered due to its popularity. It must be me, I thought, who just doesn’t appreciate what must be certainly a good book.
There is one murder of a beautiful, sexy, troubled woman. The cast of characters is small, and it is fairly obvious who killed her. Yet, 90% of the book consists of the shallow inner dialogue of banal characters. The primary narrator is an unhappy divorced woman who drinks too much and is obsessed by the apparent marital happiness of her ex and the happiness of everyone else she watches from her commuter train window. There is no action here. She provides no insight, other than her envy of others – their clothes, their comfy homes, their sex lives.
I’m a man, but I felt sort of embarrassed for how women were stereotyped in this novel. The book assumed a conspiratorial “between us girls” understanding that it is obvious that any woman would love to receive a shear little black teddy from her husband for her birthday. Any woman would fantasize that her husband would ravish her as she walks in the front door at the end of a workday. Any woman would feel glowing self-conscious pride walking the street with her baby in a stroller and her husband on her arm, while all the childless, unmarried women look on in envy.
This book’s plot plods along with vain inner dialogue and almost no action.
I saved myself for the smash hit, Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens. While some parts are unlikely and hard to believe, it contains beauty, tenderness and insight. It is the story of a girl, Kya, who lives alone in a shack in the wild marsh of the North Carolina coast, abandoned by her family when she was six years old. Kya manages to become self-sufficient with no education, no money, and no social support, through spunk and dogged inventiveness. She is feral, and just one step away from a child raised by wolves.
She comes to be known to the people of the nearest town as the Marsh Girl, a figure of ridicule and mystery. She lives utterly alone, and learns of everything by experience – her first menstruation, her first attempt to pay for groceries with coins, her first awareness of sexual desire. She is utterly fascinated with the nature around her – plants, shells, animals, and mushrooms. Eventually, an older boy with a heart of gold, who also loves nature, teaches her to read. With literacy, she is off to the races, eventually becoming a published naturalist.
These are the 1960s, and there is a murder in the first pages of the book. Owens does a nice job of splicing the years of Kya’s development with the clues of the murder. The characters of the nearby poor little town – the sheriff, the local mean girls, the social elite (the ministers’ wives), and the local segregated black community – are drawn beautifully and empathetically.
Eventually there is a murder trial, and my sense is that Owens was a bit out of her John Grisham comfort zone in describing the courtroom drama. But, cross-examination provided Owens a great opportunity to reveal the prejudices, strengths and weaknesses of local witnesses in a 1-horse town “show trial.”
Kya is propelled by her love of nature, formed in her inner being without the prompt of an education or a mentor. Even though Kya is captivated by nature, there is no mistaking that she is lonely. This is not the story of a girl who doesn’t need others. It is the story of a girl who can find meaning even if it must be without others. Actually, she is the opposite of the women in The Girl on the Train, who could not live without the attention and approval of others.
Some parts of the story strained credulity – the ability of a six year old to support herself, and a trial that seemed a bit too close to Perry Mason – but the author succeeded in overcoming our disbelief by spinning a fast-moving tale of the wonder of nature and self-discovery.
Bob Fall 