The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

Published by Viking on June 9, 2011

The premise of Rebecca Makkai’s entertaining first novel is farfetched.  Librarian Lucy Hull takes an unintended road trip with ten-year-old Ian Drake, son of fundamentalist parents who have enrolled Ian in classes held by the notorious Pastor Bob, a “formerly” gay man who conducts classes designed to turn gay kids straight.  To Lucy’s dismay, Ian’s mother seems intent on saving him from the evil world of children’s literature.  The road trip, taken without the knowledge or consent of Ian’s parents, brings Lucy and Ian into contact with the man Lucy is dating (a musician whose most recent composition resembles the Mr. Clean jingle) and her father, a Russian immigrant with a hidden past and shady ties to organized crime who is nonetheless a decent fellow -- at least when it comes to Lucy.  If the road trip happened in the real world, reporters would be asking Lucy “What were you thinking?” as she’s hauled off to prison.  It’s never quite clear, even to Lucy, what she’s thinking, but the unlikely set-up makes it possible for Makkai to tell a funny story.  Makkai somehow manages to make it seem real, or perhaps the story has sufficient charm to encourage the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

As much as I enjoyed the story, I was left with a “Is that all there is?” feeling at the novel’s end, which seems too neat and painless given the improbable events that precede it.  As I finished reading I was wondering what point Makkai intended to make.  Of course, not all novels need to have a point; it’s often enough to tell a good story while introducing the reader to believable characters.  Yet The Borrower seems determined to deliver a message.  In that task, the novel fails -- or, at least, I failed to find a coherent message.  At one point, Lucy decides that it’s impossible for people to save people, but she’s convinced that books can save people (to that end, Lucy encourages Ian to read books that will save him from the closed-minded dictates of his parents’ religion).  I’m not sure that observation makes sense:  if a book opens a reader’s mind, information and advice coming from a trusted friend can likely achieve the same end.  At another point, Lucy observes that people cannot change.  While it’s true that people can’t change immutable characteristics of their birth (such as sexual identity, which Pastor Bob is determined to “fix” in the classes that Ian attends), it is also true that people can change many aspects of their life.  Lucy, in fact, comes to realize that she needs to change her life, but that realization is underwhelming, given that she decides she doesn’t like her job, or more particularly her boss, and concludes she should find a new one.  Since it was clear from the novel’s opening pages that Lucy’s boss was unlikable, it isn’t easy to understand why Lucy took so long to see the obvious.  If the road trip was a journey toward self-awareness for Lucy, it was a long drive to a trivial destination.

Having said all that, I fear I've made my reaction to the novel seem more negative than it actually was.  I appreciated Makkai’s ability to create engaging characters and to incorporate certain devices (like a very funny list of the things a ten-year-old will do while brushing his teeth) that make The Borrower an easy, amusing read.  While I was ultimately disappointed that the novel didn’t have more substance, I don’t regret the time I spent breezing through it.  The scenes that feature precocious ten-year-old Ian work well, and if Lucy’s attempt to learn something meaningful about her own life seems incomplete, that didn’t stop me from chuckling at the funny parts -- and there are a good many of them.  This is a promising first novel, one that encourages me to read Makkai’s next book.  I only hope it carries a bit more weight than this one.

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Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 25, 2011

Mickey Spillane was a master of the noir title:  My Gun is Quick remains my favorite, but almost equally high on my list of stellar titles are I, the Jury; The Big Kill; and Kiss Me, Deadly.  Kiss Her Goodbye just doesn’t have the same danger-laden pizzazz.  Its subdued title notwithstanding, the novel feels very much like a Mike Hammer story:  edgy, violent, fast-paced and action-filled. 

Hammer was always a bit too self-righteous for my taste, too given to seeing himself as an avenging instrument of justice and too frequently indulging in rants against the many categories of people he believes the world would be better off without.  Although it’s been years since I last read a Hammer novel, the latest installment depicts a somewhat more introspective Mike Hammer than the one I remember.  I wouldn’t say he’s mellowed; he doesn’t kill anyone until about two-thirds of the way through the novel but the body count rises dramatically as the novel nears its end (particularly when Hammer tells us he “passed the grease gun across a sea of faces and turned them scarlet and screaming”).  Still, Hammer engages in less moralizing as he did in some of the earlier novels and his misogynistic opinions are a bit more muted (both of those changes are improvements, in my view).  Plots in a few Hammer novels seem like an excuse for Hammer to go on a rampage, dispensing street justice with his .44.  Kiss Her Goodbye gives the reader a taste of the rampaging Hammer but also delivers a relatively nuanced plot that is both coherent and engaging.

After a year of retirement in Florida while recovering from a wound he received in a shootout with the Bonetti family, Hammer returns to New York to attend the funeral of his mentor, Bill Doolan.  Hammer can’t believe Doolan would commit suicide, despite the terminal cancer that promised him only three more months of pain-filled life.  After leaving the funeral, while riding with the captain of the homicide division, Hammer spots a murder victim, Virginia Mathes, lying dead on a city sidewalk.  Hammer improbably intuits that Mathes was not killed in a random mugging and that her murder is somehow related to Doolan’s death.  Adding to the mystery are a dead hooker, an uncut diamond that was smuggled out of Russia before the Second World War, a stunning Brazilian singer named Chrome, and Doolan’s unlikely membership in a trendy NYC disco called Club 52.  It all adds up to an entertaining, plausibly-plotted story that leads to a satisfying (although not entirely surprising) resolution.

Despite being an enormously popular writer in his day, Spillane was never in the same league as the best writers of crime fiction who preceded him:  Chandler, Cain, and Hammett.  Compared to most other pulp fiction authors, however, Spillane stood out.  Spillane nourished the reading public’s desire for sex and violence using a spare, undemanding prose style that was perfect for the gritty stories he wrote.  We don’t know how much of the writing in Kiss Her Goodbye is Spillane’s and how much is Allan Collins’ -- the introduction tells us only that Collins was working from Spillane’s plot notes, character sketches, and a “false start” -- but it doesn’t really matter.  Kiss Her Goodbye is unmistakably a Mike Hammer novel:  a little trashy, sometimes childish, but always entertaining.

Although set in the 1970’s, the novel is written in the less-than-PC language of the 1950’s:  women are either dolls or broads and nearly every description of a female includes a commentary on her breasts.  Offensive though that might be, ‘twere it otherwise it wouldn’t be a Mike Hammer novel.  It is what it is.  Kiss Her Goodbye is the kind of throwback novel that most fans of old-school, hard-boiled detective fiction should enjoy.  I thought it was well done.

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