If someone is so loathe to talk to you about their dark past, you shouldn't be so surprised when you hear about their dark past.
Well my very first impression of Andrew Klavan's Man and Wife was wrong: the cover was not an inconsequential image, but a depiction of a locale that was used extensively in the book. Yet it had no real specific weighted prominence as a site and was only a place where things happened to happen. It is such a placid and innocuous image and place that the cover could just have easily featured a picture of the main characters car, or his wife's winter coat.
According to the narrative voice, Man and wife is a story of how love blinded psychiatrist Cal Bradley to his wife's true nature or history, and as such allowed BAD THINGS to happen while homo-terrified patient Peter Blue healed lepers, talked in riddles, and reminded Cal of his dead sister. In actual fact, it's a story of how one man knew and suspected exactly what his wife was doing and used the narrative voice to tell us all about it, then expressed surprise when he was proven right. His closing declarations that "I didn't see what was right in front of my eyes ... if only I'd seen through [the] lies" are absolute bull.
I am sick of lazy protagonists. Cal Bradley doesn't do anything, he merely walks in on others as they do things (usually suicides), or responds to their actions with mood swings, brooding, and ridiculously long chains of thought. His constant speculation stream-of-consciousness narrative and the way the "story" constantly jumps from one point and event to the next with very little stringing them together obviously appeals to me as anyone familiar with my own style would expect, but it is lazy writing. He turns over one idea then another just to dismiss them both and the you can't help but feel he's dawdling for word count and padding, while the frenetic leaps in story and backstory allow seemingly unconnected events to be strung together, deadening any surprise when it turns out (shock! horror!) that they are in fact connected.
Such flowing text also poses problems laid next to speech, often presenting a scene where the characters seem to be idly pausing, waiting for the narrator to finish rambling before they continue their sentences, destroying the sense of time and causing distance between the reader and the situations of the text. Not that they can get a word out with the number of cliches they're choking on "...a gun's just gonna piss him off ... it warmed my cockles... let the chips fall where they may ... put a sock in it ... oh my stars and garters..."
Omnipotent narrators have the benefit of placing no doubt on how people and places look, and Klavan has a good gift for keeping the text visual and energetic, but this all-is-known attitude removes the opportunity for questions and interpretation. The more questions that a first person narrator asks of the story, the less that a reader will ask questions for themselves.
Man and Wife even occasionally pauses to check that the reader truly understands and is on the side of the narrative voice, forcing a bending of interpretation that is in danger of alienating the reader. Which is a pity, since Andrew Klavan has enough strength and quality in his wordcraft to be able to trust that the reader is already responding accordingly.
That said, the characters are quite grey and mailable, with so little that their physical attributes are constantly reiterated and their names are almost onomatopoeic. It's no surprise the smallest child is affectionately called "Tot". Bradley's seems at odds with himself, viewing infidelity and lies as VERY BAD THINGS but seeming shrugging off murder, thinking the lies about such an act are much worse than the deed itself.
There is no explanation for the Jesus-like nature of Peter Blue, or how he is able to affect those around him and why. One scene even has him doling out endless sandwiches ala loaves and fishes, and all those observing seem to take this as just a character quirk rather than, oh I don't know, SOMETHING THAT DEFYS THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.
Blue has an anti-church, Gospel of Thomas-esque view, but this is never truly explored, and left under the question mark of whether it's a progressive, forward-thinking thought that Klavan wants you to think on, or just the off-kilter ramblings of a damaged child with trouble integrating.
I'm slightly annoyed and pleased to admit I enjoyed reading Man and Wife, pitting my expectations of loathing against my eagerness of reading as ti did. However I felt myself once again following a narrator inside and outside his head only out of curiosity as to where the author will take them, and not out of any genuine concern or interest in the character themselves...
Nick
xx
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