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| 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).
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| 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.
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| Avon at least got its cover right for its 1982 paperback edition of Family Reunion. |
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 appears and disappears in different places in 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.
