Reading Roundup: Sin in the Suburbs More Fun Than Small Town Secrets

The cover for the 1962 paperback
 edition of John D. MacDonald’s
Soft Touch suggests it’s a novel about
 a vacation fling gone wrong. Regardless,
I wish the eBay seller I bought this
from had chosen a different spot for
their barcode.

As important as the setting can be to a story, I often encounter authors (and sometimes filmmakers) who treat it as inconsequential. This is especially true of books about the sexploits of the beautiful people, which usually do little more than mention the city where the characters reside/travel to (Los Angeles, New York, Paris) and a few chic locations (Rodeo Drive, Le Cirque, Maxim’s) before focusing on excessive cocaine use, backstabbing and fucking. Of course, there are other authors who go too far in the other direction and use up a lot of ink with florid descriptions of every vista observed, every street traveled, every room entered, every zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

But most authors get it just right, careful to evoke their story’s setting without writing about it to distraction. Not surprisingly, one of those authors is John D. MacDonald, whose 1958 thriller SOFT TOUCH provides a snapshot of suburban depravity, where bored couples fill their empty existences with liberal amounts of alcohol and casual flings. For Jerry, suburbia is a stifling prison, made unendurable by his wife Lorraine, described as “unhappy, shallow, lazy, short-tempered, cruel and amoral.” Lorraine spends most of her time partying with the neighbors, only coming home to sleep it off or pregame for the next night. Jerry wants to divorce her and hook up with Liz, the attractive secretary at E.J. Malton Construction Company where he works. Except, the construction company is owned by his father-in-law. If only he had the capital to start his own company, he could make a clean break and start over with Liz.

Enter his old war buddy, Vince Biskay, who now works as a pilot doing odd jobs for a South American dictator. Vince has come to Jerry with a scheme to intercept a suitcase filled with the dictator’s cash in Miami before it’s handed over to an arms dealer. Jerry is resistant at first but is ultimately swayed when assured he’ll be little more than a getaway driver.

Things don’t go as planned, and they get worse as Jerry’s increasing greed and paranoia clouds his thinking. The ever-reliable MacDonald ramps up the tension as Jerry tries to stay one step ahead of real and imagined threats, convinced he’s pulling it off despite his near-misses and total fuckups, which includes a fight with Lorraine that ends very badly and a tryst with one of the neighborhood’s bored, horny housewives who steps naked out of the bedroom at the worst possible moment.

Soft Touch is a lean, fast-paced thriller that proves once again that MacDonald was a master of the genre. I’ll also recommend the 1961 movie adaptation, Man-Trap. Though Ed Waters’ screenplay takes a lot of liberties with the book’s story, giving it a much happier ending, the movie is largely worth watching for Stella Stevens’ enjoyably nasty performance as Lorraine (re-named Nina in the movie for some reason).

The model’s expression on this 1975
paperback edition of The World They Wanted
is less “Come hither,” and more “What
 the hell do you want?”

Sticking with another tried-and-true author, I selected something from the Herbert Kastle bibliography, THE WORLD THEY WANTED, in which suburban malaise moves to center stage.

Though the cover of the Mayflower Books edition I have makes the novel appear to be about bed-hopping in the 1970s, the novel was originally published in 1962, when women weren’t expected to have ambitions beyond becoming a housewife, when $17K a year was a decent income, and when a three-bedroom split level could be purchased for $20,000. And $20 grand is what it costs to buy such a home in Birch Hills, a development that’s the brainchild of builder Matt Swain, who hopes there are New York City residents willing to make the move to a more bucolic setting.

Plenty are. Among the first to buy homes in Birch Hills are the Rands, who hope that their juvenile delinquent son George will start flying right once he’s moved away from the bad influences of the city. Joe Bialdi, who has been struggling with mental illness much of his adult life, thinks owning a home in Birch Hills will give him plenty of projects to occupy his troubled mind. Only the Lerners make the move to the ’burbs for typical reasons—more space for the kids—though Miriam Lerner wishes her husband Dave would consider some place closer to NYC, a place that is known to have a Jewish community. Dave, who wants only to assimilate into WASP circles, is drawn to Birch Hills precisely because it affords him an opportunity to deny his Jewish identity.

Of course, the move doesn’t mean their problems stay behind in the city. George Rand finds different ways to rebel, mainly by boning the Bialdis’ overweight daughter, Josie, who has decided the best way to attract boys’ attention is to put out (well, she’s not wrong). Meanwhile, his parents’ marriage begins to fall apart. Steve Rand becomes an alcoholic, and his wife Nancy reveals herself to be a judgmental, antisemitic bitch who hates sex. Is it any wonder that Steve cheats on her?

The move also threatens the Lerners’ marriage. Dave, a commercial artist, is experiencing a career slump and takes his frustrations out on his wife—violently at one point. Miriam, who’s seen how Matt Swain looks at her, contemplates having an affair. Joe Bialdi, on the other hand, seems to get what he wants out of the move, but mowing the lawn and chopping wood can’t keep his inner demons at bay when he discovers George is “taking advantage of” Josie.

It's tempting to label The World They Wanted as a soap opera and, well, it basically is, but it’s more John Updike than Grace Metalious. It has plenty of lurid parts, but they are written to make a point rather than titillate—and much less explicit than similar scenes in Kastle’s later books. Kastle certainly has the talent to pull off a more ambitious novel, and he almost does it with The World They Wanted. Unfortunately, it’s brought down with a wrap-around narrative concerning Matt Swain and his sales director Adeline Teel. I found myself way more invested in Matt’s business challenges than whether he’d finally come to his senses and marry Adeline (or whether “Addy” would finally come to hers and move on). Worse, Kastle gives the book a corny ending that’s so Hollywood romance you can practically hear the swelling orchestra as you read the final paragraphs.

Avon at least got its cover right for its
1982 paperback edition of
Family Reunion.

Still, I’ll take an OK Herbert Kastle novel over a dud suspense novel, which is what I got when I picked up 1982’s FAMILY REUNION by Joyce Harrington, an author primarily known for writing short stories.

Ten years have passed since Jenny Holland left behind her mother and the small town she grew up in for New York City. Though she hasn’t once visited during her decade away, she has kept in touch with letters to her mentally unstable mother, who never replies, and her cousin Wendell, who writes frequently, never mind that Jenny rejected his wedding proposal before lighting out for NYC. (As for that whole cousins thing: Our cousinship was far enough removed to make this union not only feasible but appropriate.) Recently (roughly 1979 or ’80) Wendell has been writing to Jenny about a planned family reunion at River House, her late grandmother’s estate that has been vacant since her passing. Jenny, who has some unanswered questions about her late father as well as hoping to make amends with her mother, decides the reunion is as good a time to visit as any, and books a flight.

Returning to her hometown raises more questions than answers. An antique straight razor frequently disappears, only to reappear in different parts of River House. The door to the house’s cupola has rusted hinges but a shiny new padlock that is sometimes locked, sometimes not. Jenny returns to her room to find her new clothes cut to ribbons. A heavy dresser in an upstairs children’s room is mysteriously overturned while all adults are on the ground floor. Jenny hears ghostly voices calling to her from across the nearby river. The face of an old hag appears in a kitchen window, disappearing just as suddenly. Are these events supernatural, or part of a sinister real-world plot? Also, what really happened to Jenny’s father?

These mysterious goings-on and past secrets might have yielded an intriguing Midwest gothic (assuming Jenny’s hometown is a fictional stand-in for Harrington’s hometown of Marietta, Ohio), if only Harrington hadn’t written the suspense out of her story at almost every turn. The characterization of Jenny, our narrator, is uneven to the point of being annoying. She is at once quirky and independent, passive and needy, depending on what the story needs her to be. There are a few passages that imply she’s possibly unwell, such as when, seemingly possessed, she contemplates slicing her wrist with that straight razor. One could argue that revelations later in the book would explain some of her behavior, such as her becoming more unsure of herself once in the presence of her family, but Harrington never quite makes that connection.

But Jenny isn’t the only problem character. There is Wendell’s sister Fearn (probably pronounced Fern, but that extraneous “a” had me wanting to pronounce it Fee-urn), who is mildly bitchy at best, a total cunt at worst, and she’s usually at her worst. When she’s not berating Jenny like a high school bully she’s yelling at her children whenever they move, being downright abusive to her daughter Millie. However, there are moments when she’s suddenly nice to Jenny, which immediately struck me as suspicious. These moments come to nothing, though, and Fearn resumes being her usual unpleasant self. Another thought was Fearn was being set up as cannon fodder and I eagerly awaited the moment she was killed by whatever/whoever is terrorizing this family reunion, or at the very least, that someone would beat the shit out of her. Instead, Fearn remains unharmed for the entire book, with no one, not even Jenny, bothering to call her out on her shitty attitude.

Most of the other characters in Jenny’s family are written as either judgmental biddies or close-minded yokels, suspicious of Jenny and her big city ways. The few exceptions are Aunt Tillie, a sharp-tongued retired schoolteacher, and another conveniently distant cousin, David, a hot, motorcycle riding hippie who lives in Tucson with his young son Malachi. David becomes Jenny’s closest ally and eventual love interest, Harrington having a thing about keeping romance within the family.

To Harrington’s credit, she does effectively capture the setting of River House and its nearby town, though her description of the unnamed town’s named neighborhood of Muley is cringeworthy: It wasn’t quite the town ghetto, but a few [B]lacks lived there. Oof! Too bad Harrington seemed more concerned with writing about Jenny’s hometown like a high school outcast with an axe to grind than crafting an entertaining gothic thriller. Had it been kept to 200 pages, Family Reunion could have been a tight tale of suspense. Instead, it’s a long-winded and tedious 304 pages, not really kicking into gear until its final 75. Like most family reunions, this one’s best avoided.

If You Lived Here You’d be Dead by Now

The cover to Condominium’s
1978 paperback edition. Nice
illustration, blah typography.

For all of Florida’s selling points—sunny weather, beautiful beaches, no state income tax, (relatively) affordable housing, plentiful cocaine—there are just as many reasons to avoid the Sunshine State: too fucking hot, hurricanes, corruption, Mar-a-Lago, a shit-ton of sinkholes, these fine people. For authors, however, all of these reasons make Florida a great setting for a story. As humorist and Florida resident Dave Barry remarked, “Florida is a never-ending source of material. It’s a statistical fact that while Florida has only 6 percent of the nation's population, it produces 57 percent of the nation's weirdness.”

Though Florida wasn’t without its weirdness when novelist and Sarasota resident John D. MacDonald was alive (he died in 1986), the state’s tinfoil hat-wearing population hadn’t yet grown into the national punchline/desired voting bloc that now provides fodder for the works of Barry, Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey. Not that MacDonald would write novels like Bad Monkey or Florida Roadkill had he been confronted with today’s Florida Man. Though not without humor, “wacky” is not an adjective I’d ascribe to MacDonald’s writing. MacDonald’s Florida is more grounded, at once seductive and sinister. You’ll come for the sunshine (and likely a woman and a large sum of money), but you might not survive your stay.

In MacDonald’s 1977 novel CONDOMINIUM, Florida’s Fiddler Key, the fictional stand-in for Siesta Key, where the author lived, is a haven for retirees, drawn to the beautiful beaches, the warm weather and the affordable luxury of the Golden Sands condominium. They’re easy marks for real estate developer Marty Liss, who built many of the condos on Fiddler Key, Golden Sands among them, and has plans to build another one — Harbour Pointe — next to it, confident his luck will prevail despite a flagging real estate market. Liss, who “had a third wife he mistrusted and two grown children he despised,” gets his confidence bolstered by his secretary Drusilla, with whom he shares trysts between business meetings. Life is good in Fiddler Key, and it can only get better.

Of course, we know it can’t. Residents at Golden Sands begin to suspect they were sold a bill of goods. Many of them are up in arms about maintenance fees being doubled, especially when they’re already made responsible for any repairs needed in their units (Julian Higbee, who manages the Golden Sands with his wife Lorrie, is more interested in bedding the younger female residents than wasting time fixing a geezer’s air-conditioner). This actually sets the stage for a vividly drawn condo residents’ meeting, the tedium, the tangents, the tantrums and, ultimately, the futility immediately recognizable to anyone who has attended a meeting where the floor is opened for attendees to speak.

Retired engineer Gus Garver is a resident who has concerns about Golden Sands’ very structure. Gus only bought his unit because his wife Carolyn fell in love with the place, but the couple were barely in it a year before Carolyn suffered a series of medical emergencies, beginning, I shit you not, with a slip on a discarded banana peel, and wound up in a nursing home. Without his wife around to sing Golden Sands’ praises — and without a job to occupy his time — Gus begins to take note of the condo’s flawed construction. The building wouldn’t stand up in earthquake country, he observes. What are its chances in hurricane country?

Meanwhile, Liss runs into a snag with his proposed Harbour Pointe project when his bank puts a freeze on his line of credit. “The fat rosy ass has fallen off the economy,” the president of the bank explains. In an effort to keep in the developer’s good graces, the bank president puts Liss in touch with Sherman Grome, the shady-as-fuck CEO of an Atlanta-based real estate investment trust. Liss doesn’t like Grome or his questionable deal — a kickback scheme that requires Liss to take over Tropic Towers, a failing property Grome financed — but agrees so he can get Harbour Pointe built. And this is just the beginning of his problems.

Because Liss has greased a lot of palms in city and county government, construction on Harbour Pointe begins almost as soon as Liss deposits Grome’s check. To the horror of the denizens of Golden Sands, the lush tropical jungle beside their building is bulldozed to make way for the new condo complex. Liss, of course, doesn’t lose much sleep over the cries of his properties’ outraged residents. He doesn’t even worry too much about the FBI looking into Sherman Grome’s business deals — that is, until Liss’s associates start cooperating with investigators.

While Marty Liss’s business crumbles and Golden Sands residents’ dreams shatter, few people are thinking about hurricanes. Garver is like a dog with a bone, however, and with the financial help of Golden Sands’ very rich and very ill penthouse resident LeGrande Messenger (think Warren Buffet with cancer), commissions a colleague, marine civil engineer Sam Harrison, to make a thorough investigation to determine Golden Sands’ chances of withstanding natural catastrophe. Sam is just as dogged as Gus, though he soon becomes preoccupied by feelings for Messenger’s much younger and very attractive wife, Barbara.

And out in the Atlantic, tropical storm Ella is gaining strength as she heads toward the Gulf Coast...

More Than Corruption and Natural Disaster

The paperback cover for the 1980
mini-series tie-in is an upgrade
from the original design, IMO.

Condominium is an epic (1985 Fawcett paperback I read is almost 480 pages) and, consequently, it has a lot of characters. A shit-ton, even — far too many to keep track of, in fact, one of my few minor complaints about the book (my other being that some technical aspects, such as Marty Liss’s financial dealings and the development of Hurricane Ella, are detailed so explicitly they slow the book’s momentum). Yet, while many of these characters aren’t crucial to the story, they are essential to the novel.

As MacDonald introduces us to these various supporting characters — including a horny, hot shot real estate agent; an alcoholic widow; a militaristic blowhard obsessed with condo security; a city councilman’s adulterous wife; and an obsessive conspiracy theorist (a pretty labor-intensive pastime pre-internet) — Condominium becomes more than a novel about corrupt businessmen and natural disaster. It’s a novel about the so-called American dream, introducing us to characters who will do anything to attain it, those terrified of losing it, and those disillusioned by the very idea of it.

A passage that particularly resonates, especially now, is a conversation — a soliloquy, really* — that one of these minor characters, retired diplomat Henry Churchbridge, has with his wife Carlotta, when he observes that “Golden Sands and all of Fiddler Key stinks of fear” and why this explains Golden Sands’ resident conspiracy nut C. Noble Winney:

“On the local level they are terrified of predatory tax increases, drunken drivers, purse snatchers, muggers, power failure, water shortages, inflation and the high cost of being sick. Nationally they are afraid of big government, welfare, crime in the streets, corruption, busing, and industrial, political and fiscal conspiracy. Internationally they are afraid of the Arabs, the Blacks, the Cubans, the Communists, the Chinese, the multinational corporations, the oil cartels, pollution of the sea and the air, atomic bombs, pestilence, poisons and additives in food…

“[It] is the vast and wicked complex of interwoven fears, the personal and the specific to the vast misty uncharted, that gives all these people a feeling of helplessness when it comes to comprehending their total environment. … But these people think they have a God-given right to understand. They are educated Americans. They think that if anybody can understand the world and the times, it is an educated American. C. Noble Winney was an auditor, an accountant. Both sides of the sheet must balance. He could not cope with a nonsense world. He had to find a reason why he could not understand events. His only other choice was a permanent condition of confusion and terror. So one day he came across something which hinted at a vast conspiracy. He read further in that area. God knows, there is a very wide choice of fictional conspiracies to accept. The Rothschild anti-Semitic world-control mishmash made some kind of weird sense to C. Noble, and now he documents it. He is still afraid, but he thinks he is doing something constructive to thwart the conspirators by exposing them to people who will join him in his work.”

And this was in the 1970s. If only C. Noble had Facebook and Twitter in his time he might have learned about the Jewish space lasers.

Though I’m partial to MacDonald’s more concise thrillers (A Bullet for Cinderella, Slam the Big Door), I thoroughly enjoyed Condominium, its hardcore business talk notwithstanding. It was easy to see why it was a huge bestseller. The novel was later adapted into a miniseries in 1980 starring Barbara Eden, Dan Haggerty and Steve Forrest. Unfortunately, the miniseries isn’t available on Blu-ray or streaming. I found a copy of it on YouTube, but be warned it that it looks, well, exactly what you’d expect something recorded on VHS over 40 years ago and uploaded at 480p to look like. I haven’t watched it yet, but from reading the Wikipedia synopsis, the adaptation sounds like it has more in common with a Prime-Time soap than the source novel, because TV’s gotta TV. 

John D. MacDonald’s Florida may not be as whacked-out as his successors in the crime-in-the-Sunshine State genre, but it’s just as fascinating and well worth seeking out.

*I omitted the wife’s interruptions, which are minimal to the point they strain credulity. As if a married couple has the luxury of speaking in complete sentences, let alone full paragraphs.

ADDENDUM: This book just got a whole lot more relevant!