I’ve got a few new pieces up on the Four-Letter, including reactions to the Noel Argüelles signing, the Chone Figgins signing, and James Paxton’s lawsuit against the University of Kentucky.
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Pseudo-intellectual thrillers have thrived in recent years as a literary genre, particularly in mass-market paperbacks, with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code leading the charge, although I think the style dates back to Michael Crichton’s preachy, predictable, very fast-paced novels from the early-to-mid-1990s. They’re potboilers in fancy dress, usually with lots of explanatory text so that you’ll understand the motive of the core crime or why everyone is running very fast. The technique of putting the protagonist in jeopardy and having various suspects and witnesses killed off over the course of a book works well in the spare writing of hard-boiled detective novels, but married with …
Lev Grossman, whose The Magicians was one of the best books I read in 2009, wrote a book in that genre that dispenses with the conventions of body counts, crazy chase scenes, and character cliches (like the beautiful yet brilliant female researcher). Codex
In Codex, investment banker Edward Wozny finds himself employed to catalog the rare book collection of one of his best clients, an English duke and his wife, and despite his instinctive indignation at the menial task, he takes it on and finds himself gradually sucked into the search for the missing codex, even when he realizes that not everyone involved wants the book to be found. At the same time, Wozny’s friends introduce him to a time-sucking computer game called MOMUS that seems to Edward to offer unexplained parallels and connections to the search for the codex. In both quests, he ends up hopelessly lost and has to enlist the help of others, including a not-beautiful yet brilliant female researcher who specializes in the alleged author of the missing tome.
The stakes are high for the characters in the book, but Grossman ignores the trend of raising the stakes to fate-of-the-world status, recognizing that something as small as a battle between two members of the same family can be serious enough to cause people to throw around large sums of money and throw wrenches in the works of another person’s plans. I found that the pace of Codex accelerated as it went simply because I wanted to know where the codex was, what it meant, and why the person who employs Edward wanted to find it. Grossman also avoids the pat ending, concluding the book on an appropriately ambiguous note, although he does rely on one error of judgment by a main character to get us to the finish line.
Next up: Dawn Powell’s satire of the publishing circles of late 1930s New York (particularly Claire Boothe Luce), a somewhat forgotten novel called A Time to Be Born
I love how the NCAA cites “fairness to competing institutions” as their justification for the Restitution Bylaw which essentially just applies heavy handed pressure on Universities to suspend student athletes without any semblance of due process.
Keith, have you read Soon I Will Be Invincible? It was written by Lev Grossman’s brother, and has some of the same sensibilities as The Magicians, but involves super heroes/villians. I would definitely recommend it..
Along the lines of the pseudo-intellectual thrillers, wondered what you thought of “Anathem.” I liked the story but it suffers from, in my opinion, a preposterous ending. It is also quite long, but worth the read.