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......My trust .....has been violated |
BY JON CARROLL
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"Total Control" + + + + Does your disbelief remain unsuspended while reading Baldacci? Join Jon Carroll in Table Talk. + + + + Bestseller Hell is published monthly in Salon |
the writers of thrillers make a deal with the reader.
They faithfully promise never to write so badly as to
distract from the plot. The reader, in exchange, promises
not to complain if the plot is far-fetched, jammed with
coincidences and chock-full of elderly Nazis.
Both sides agree that the characters need not have more
than one dimension, if that.
I like thrillers; they are my airplane reading of
choice. I prefer something in the melancholy spy area, but
I will accept a ripping fascist conspiracy tale, a taut
serial killer yarn or even a chase across seven continents
in pursuit of the microchip, map, gun or vial that will
change the world.
Thus I was looking forward to "Total Control" by David
Baldacci, an author whose last book, "Absolute Power," was
turned into a movie that asked the age-old question: Did E.G
Marshall kill him or what?
So Page 1: Spooky guy sitting in a room thinking
unspecified thoughts of evil. "The slender watch on his
wrist showed it to be four o'clock in the morning." Wait a
minute: What kind of slender watch is that? How does it know whether
it's the morning or not? Is it some kind of 24-hour watch
such as a naval officer might wear? Or is it just that
Baldacci suddenly felt the need to say what time it was and
for some reason eschewed a simple declarative sentence?
I worried. Was the unspoken contract about to be
broken? Was I about to read a 520-page thriller with prose
so bad that I would not be able to suspend disbelief? This
happened to me once, in a remote cabin in a village in
Belize; the writer in question was Jeffrey Archer. Could
there really be another writer that bad?
Page 3: "The fuel panel under the wing, located about a
third of the way out from the fuselage, had been dropped
down and the long fuel hose snaked upward into the wing's
interior, where it had been locked into place around the
fuel intake valve." I guess this is some kind of bow to
Crichton-esque, Clancy-influenced technobabble, the sort of
things guys who don't hunt say to each other
instead of killing stags, but, really, there shouldn't be
this much pronoun distress in a book that was actually
edited.
I put the book down and grasped a downed electric wire
to clear my senses. It did not help.
I began to collect sentences as I went along. I
followed the plot, sort of (even attentive readers will not
be able to do much better than "sort of"), but mostly I
waited for the next entrant in the Baldacci Hall of Fame.
Page 8: "Her chiseled features had softened after the
birth of their daughter." That must have been painful.
Page 10: "His fingers were pounding the keys so
fiercely they resembled a column of miniature jackhammers."
I actually lingered over that for a while. Like a rank of
miniature pile drivers? Like an array of tiny pistons?
Writing is hard, as Barbie never once remarked.
Page 59: "George Kaplan was fifty-one years old with
thinning, gray-edged hair that covered a wide head; he
carried a small paunch on a five-foot-seven-inch frame." I'm
picturing one of those IV stands on wheels that they use in
emergency rooms; the paunch is suspended from it, looking
sort of like a dismembered bagpipe.
Page 93: "She thought she would be nauseous as the
taste of beef barley made its way into her throat, but it
finally receded into the depths of her quivering stomach."
There's a nice tidal flow to that sentence, with the beef barley rushing
into some damp, starfish-cluttered cavern.
Page 161: "Across from them were two agents from the
Washington metropolitan field office at Buzzard Point,
which, until the late eighties, had been simply the
Washington field office until the Alexandria, Virginia,
field office had been collapsed into it." Injuring nine.
Page 171: "The premise of Rapid Start was the veracity
of an electronic clearinghouse for every bit of information,
leads and anonymous tips involved in an investigation that
otherwise would become unorganized and muddled." Veracity?
Page 175: "In laymen's terms CyberCom has done nothing
less than create artificial intelligence, so-called
intelligent agents that will initially be used to effortless
navigate the myriad tributaries of the Internet and its
progeny." River, stay away from my wife.
Page 403: "Wide of hip, with lovely olive skin and a
mouth that showed many smile lines, Liz Martin was one of
the Bureau's best and hardest working lab rats." There's a
certain genius in "wide of hip," I think, a style
reminiscent of Playboy's Party Jokes.
You think I just went through finding dumb sentences,
but you're wrong. I read the whole thing. Here's my tip:
Watch out for the homos. Not every bad guy is gay, but every
gay guy is bad. And sometimes, you can't tell.
Meanwhile, how about some more beef barley soup?
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