Finders Keepers by Stephen King (2015): The year is 2014 and the mismatched detectives of last year's Mr. Mercedes are back in a new mystery set three years after the conclusion of that novel -- and, as a sub-plot, there's also an odd continuation of the events of the previous novel that seems to be setting up the events of the third novel.
Our protagonist, retired police detective Bill Hodges, continues to run his private detective agency with the help of hyper-intelligent, socially challenged Holly Gibney, with an occasional assist from now-college-student Jerome Robinson. But the scene of carnage that began Mr. Mercedes has helped deliver another case. I'll let you find out how. Suffice it to say that injury and the economic collapse of 2008 will soon put a young man on a collision course with an unusual treasure buried near his house since the late 1970's. And one collision will set off many others.
This is really an odd novel, at least for King. We spend a lot of time with that kid -- Pete Saubers -- and his economically wounded family. And we spend a lot of time learning about that treasure and the terrible man who buried it. But the money in that treasure -- about $30,000 in cash -- is the smallest portion of the booty.
See, back in the late 1970's, a lousy guy in his early 20's was obsessed with a novelist named John Rothstein, who in King's world combines the attributes of John Updike, J.D. Salinger, and Philip Roth. In the 1950's and 1960's, Rothstein wrote a trilogy of novels subsequently dubbed The Runner Trilogy. Those novels featured a protagonist who seems to combine the personality traits of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and Salinger's Holden Caulfield.
One day in the 1960's, Rothstein stopped publishing and essentially became a hermit overnight on a farm outside a small New England town. Years later, a young reader (and aspiring writer) named Morris Bellamy went looking for Rothstein. He told his two accomplices that they were looking for money. But Bellamy was really looking for Rothstein's unpublished work. And he found it. And, while fleeing from the police, buried it. Arrested and jailed for more than 30 years for a crime unconnected to the Rothstein home invasion, Bellamy finally gets out and goes looking for that unpublished work. But it isn't there -- Pete Saubers dug it up.
Morris Bellamy is one of King's more interesting antagonists, a self-pitying fan who believes he has more right to his favourite author's work than that author. The characterizations of the other characters are all solid, especially of the slowly blossoming Holly Gibney and the intelligent, thoughtful Pete Saubers, whose love of reading is ignited by the contents of that box of treasure. There's not a huge amount of detection in this second Bill Hodges volume, but the material on Rothstein, and on the used book trade (seriously), is highly enjoyable. Recommended, though keep in mind this is a mystery-thriller (mostly) and not a horror novel.
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace, containing Big Red Son; Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think; Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed; Authority and American Usage; The View From Mrs. Thompson's; How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart; Up, Simba; Consider the Lobster; Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky; Host (1996-2005; Collected 2005): Brilliant, wide-ranging collection of previously published essays from the late Wallace, who remains best known for his massive modern classic of an American novel, Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace was something of a polymath when it came to his interests as both an essayist and a writer of fiction. In this collection, he assesses the American porn industry as a fly on the wall at its annual awards convention; John Updike's solipsism; Kafka; a new volume on Standard Written (American) English; the events of 9/11 as experienced while Wallace was living in Bloomington, Indiana; sports autobiographies; John McCain's 2000 run at the Republican preisdential nomination; the annual Maine lobster festival; a new volume of Joseph Frank's exhaustive literary biography of Dostoeevsky; and a conservative LA talk radio host. Whew!
Wallace may be the smartest man in the room, but he's also humane and sympathetic and often self-deprecating. His cultural insights will make one pause at points, especially his outsider's view of McCain's campaign experienced as a temporary insider on the campaign bus. It's not that McCain and his 'Straight Talk Express' were or were not 'authentic' in a way few politicians are -- it's the complex nature of 'authenticity' on the campaign trail that Wallace investigates both generally and in detail.
Wallace also deploys an encyclopedic array of facts about his topics like a discoverer describing the culture and habits of a new country. I learned more about the nuts and bolts of American talk radio in the early 21st century here than everywhere else; I learned way more than I really wanted to know about the history of lobsters as a foodstuff. Thankfully, I'm allergic to lobsters already or I'd be ideologically allergic to them as a menu item after the title essay.
Do any of the essays suggest the long-standing bipolar disorder that would eventually help cause Wallace's suicide only a couple years after this collection was published? No, not really -- Wallace seems fully engaged with the world, his demons almost completely hidden except for a September 12, 2001 panic attack in an Indiana convenience store as he realized he couldn't find an American flag to buy for his house, American flags having sprung up everywhere after the attacks. Otherwise, though, Wallace's accounts of his interactions with the broad spectrum of people and places in this collection suggests someone intelligent, highly analytical, earnest, witty, and thoroughly engaged with the world. Highly recommended.
