November
2002
Book Reviews:
Hard
Eight
By Janet Evanovich
New York: St. Martin's Press
311 Pages
$25.95 (Hardcover)
The
Vintage Book of War Fiction
Edited by Sebastian Faulks and Jorg Hensgen
New York: Vintage Books
416 Pages
$14 (Paperback)
Reviewed
by Mark M. Feffer
I have
to admit it: I am officially bored with Stephanie Plum and her exploits
in Chambersburg. Stephanie, the heroine of eight novels by Janet
Evanovich, is a native Trentonian, a bounty hunter for her cousin
Vinny's bail-bond service, and seems to have a love-hate relationship
with luck. On the one hand, a lot of things go wrong for her. Her
cars have a tendency to burst into flame, and she never has a can
of pepper spray around when she needs one. On the other hand, someone-her
on-again/off-again boyfriend Detective Joe Morelli, or the ever-mysterious
mercenary and fellow bounty hunter Ranger-always arrive in time
to save her from whatever bad guy happens to be chasing her. But
reading through Hard Eight, Evanovich's latest, I couldn't
help but think I'd read this all before-several times before. When
you start to think you're not seeing enough of Stephanie's pet hamster,
you know there's something wrong.
The
Stephanie Plum books are adventures, not mysteries, so they're less
puzzles than amusement park rides. In this episode, Stephanie's
not after a wayward criminal-she's trying to find seven-year-old
Annie and her mother, Evelyn, who've disappeared as part of a child-custody
dispute. Fairly quickly, Stephanie tracks them down and discovers
they are running not so much from a nasty divorce as they are from
real danger. Evelyn's estranged husband has connections of a sort
to the psychotic Trenton mobster Eddie Abruzzi, and-even worse-she
has something that Abruzzi wants.
The
plot is typical of one of these novels, but this time around Evanovich
seems bored herself. The same cast of characters is doing the same
loopy things, Stephanie and Morelli are doing the same old dance,
and though Stephanie and Ranger finally cut through their sexual
tension, too often I found myself skimming past pages because the
story simply wasn't holding my attention. In particular, the villain
Abruzzi's evil seems more manufactured than anything else, and the
book's ending is so contrived I couldn't help but feel the author
got tired of trying to come up with a clever ending, so she wrapped
things up as quickly as possible.
If
you're a fan of Stephanie Plum, this is a book worth skimming. For
my part, I'm hoping Stephanie gets reinvigorated the next time around,
maybe chasing down some depraved kingpin in the seedy side of an
exotic locale-like Princeton.
*
* *
The
Vintage Book of War Fiction, edited by Sebastian Faulks and
Jorg Hensgen, is a collection of forty stories and novel excerpts
by writers from the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Germany, and the
United States. Beginning with the First World War and progressing
through the Persian Gulf, the book presents war from the viewpoint
of soldiers, nurses, ambulance drivers, reporters, and civilians.
Some
of the voices are horrified, others irate at the sheer meanness
of the organizations that have swept them up-to say nothing of the
danger and gore they face by the light of fires and flares. The
book excerpts some works you'd expect, such as Hemingway's A
Farewell to Arms (which gets my nomination for most overrated
book of the mid-20th Century), Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet
on the Western Front, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead,
and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
What
makes the book worth reading, though, are chapters from lesser known
works: "Invisible Enemies," for example, taken from David
Malouf's novel Fly Away Peter, is the most harrowing description
of war in the trenches I've ever read.
Still,
I expected to like this collection more than I did. Relying on so
many novel excerpts, the book never is able to maintain its momentum.
The power of the novels is rarely apparent in these snippets, since
we're not given enough time to know their characters and empathize
with the emotions roiling through them. Interestingly, the clearest
exception to this is from Alistair MacLean, an author best known
for writing adventures such as The Guns of Navarone and
Ice Station Zebra. Because it focuses on action rather than
character, his description of a U-boat attack above the Arctic Circle,
taken from the novel HMS Ulysses, is like a series of well-placed
punches.
# #
#
Mark
Feffer is founding editor of the Trenton Writes Project
