On the Street Where You Live, by Mary Higgins.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
$26 - 317 pages.

Pale Horse Coming, by Stephen Hunter.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
$25 - 480 pages.

Dumb and dumber.

Let’s start with dumb. Mary Higgins Clark’s On The Street Where You Live is the story of murder past and present in Spring Lake, a resort town on the Jersey Shore. Emily Graham, an attorney, buys a house in Spring Lake that once belonged to her family. While in the process of moving her belongings into the house and beginning a new job in Manhattan, Emily becomes aware that all is not right in Spring Lake. First, the lingering effects of three unsolved murders from the turn of the last century still haunt the town and its people. Now another murderer appears, a man intent on duplicating those awful kills from the last century.

Although Emily stands at the center of this suspense novel, Mary Higgins Clark has created a swarm of other characters as well. In fact, so many people kept popping up on these pages that I couldn’t keep track of them, feeling like a man trying to match the faces and names of a roomful of strangers on New Year’s Eve. Besides being confused by the milling crowd of characters, I found that nearly all the men in the book were suspect in the killings because of another crime  extortion, stalking, income tax evasion  committed earlier in their lives. Finally I picked as my suspect the man in town who seemed most innocent and was pleased to discover near the end of the book that I had fingered the killer.

What makes this novel dumb is Emily’s reaction to the threats on her life (for instance, she remains in the house alone on a night when she is fairly certain of being murdered there), the numerous crimes committed by the other characters to throw us off the track of the real killer, and the sort of wooden dialogue that passes for Emily’s thought processes. The asides in the book on reincarnation and Christianity are particularly galling, embarrassing and ill informed as the headlines of a grocery store tabloid. On The Street Where You Live has the taste of a child’s store-bought birthday cake: all sugar with no real flavor.

Now for the dumber. Although I have admired Stephen Hunter’s work  Dirty White Boys and The Master Sniper are both first-class suspense novels  his recent Pale Horse Coming has more baloney in it than a lunch-hour delicatessen. Here we have a group of extremely sadistic redneck prison officials, linked with a nutty scientist who is working for the government to develop a new strain of venereal disease that may be used as a sort of germ warfare, operating a state penal farm for blacks. The year is 1946, and as the jacket cover says, it’s “... the Old South at its most brutal” (It’s also fiction at its most banal).

Enter Earl Swagger, the Marine Corps hero, who helps his friend Sam Vincent by penetrating the prison, uncovering its secrets, escaping, and then recruiting a band of famous Americans, including World War II’s most decorated soldier Audie Murphy, called here Audie Ryan, to help destroy the evil prison and free the prisoners. Earl convinces Sam that there isn’t time to investigate the abuses of the prison, that “... we can turn talk and forget about it ... or we can blow it off the face of the earth.” Hunter then spends the rest of the book telling us how this group of vigilantes blows the prison off the face of the earth.

This book is so dumb, the characters so stiff and inhuman, the suspense so predictable, the morality so black and white, that it should embarrass even the most forgiving reader. Hunter’s guards at the prison are also so fatheaded  and many apparently fat-bellied as well  that one wonders how they survive in this supposedly tough prison in the middle of a swamp. Hunter’s take on blacks registers the usual racist premises that all blacks are folksy and “good.” The speech of both the black prisoners and their white guards sounds as if it was copied from old movies like “In The Heat Of The Night” (Hunter is a film critic, so maybe the Southern speech was copied from movies), The lame plot with its stereotypical views of the South might have been created by a writer for the Washington Post (Hunter is a writer for the Washington Post).

Fiction is in a sorry state these days. It isn’t just the crude approach to the meaning of the human person; it isn’t the stereotypes or the ugly language; it isn’t even the sheer and profoundly meaningless act of having created nearly 500 pages of a story this bad and then seeing that story into print. No, what we are witnessing in Pale Horse Coming, in On The Street Where You Live, and in a veritable host of other novels is a triumph of irrationality. Many writers no longer seem to care whether their plots make sense or whether their adult characters actually resemble adults. Instead, the plots have become less and less natural, more and more the creations of minds that can no longer reason clearly.

If fiction is, as some contend, a mirror of our lives and times, then looking into that mirror by way of these books can be a sobering experience indeed.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville.)

 

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