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Uncomfortable, but something for everyone
Book Review
By Derryll White
Coben, Harlan (2013). Stay Close.
Harlan Coben is the kind of writer who can open with a Bruce Springsteen quote and keep the sound of that driving guitar and gravelly voice constant throughout the whole novel. I think he is that good.
‘Stay Close’ is typical Coben territory. Meghan Pierce is a delectable soccer mom with a hard-partying, sex club past. She is driven by both social responsibility and a manifest sense of personal discomfort to forsake her suburban safety. Detective Broome is a veteran of the Atlantic City police force. He upholds the law but sometimes makes decisions based on what he thinks best for decent people while not adhering to the letter of the law. He is driven by a 17-year-old cold case, determined to tumble the bad guy and free the innocent. Coben has morals and he imbues his characters with them.
The bad guys are complex – bound to the Mob but operating in a moral free-for-all that makes all of their perverted acts okay, to them. They started out, the Ken and Barbie team of killers, as Christian camp counselors, righting small wrongs. And they got hooked on pain and power.
Coben always seems to stop me – make me think. He piles scene upon scene, character upon character, and somewhere in there I find myself. I always ask why? Why do we as a species do that? Why do we as reasoning human beings threat others like that? Why do we let the greedy bastards consume and destroy our world on the fetid altar of economics? Coben always rattles my chains and gets me thinking.
In the end this is another work of fiction. But Harlan Coben is a master at poking around in my brain, making me think about men, and women, and how that all works. We should all thank Coben for putting the spotlight on abusive relationships. We have to make it known that that kind of control is just not permissible.
I liked this book. It wasn’t comfortable, but there is something here for nearly everyone.
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Excerpts from the novel:
SELF-WORTH – …Celeb Experience: Paparazzi for Hire – which was just what it sounded like. Ray didn’t stalk celebrities hoping to get compromising shots to sell to tabloids like a real paparazzo. No, Ray was actually beneath that – Beatlemania to the Beetles – offering the “celebrity experience” to wannabes who were willing to pay. In short, clients, most with extreme self-esteem and probably erectile dysfunction issues, hired paparazzi to follow them around, snapping pictures to give them, per the brochure, “the ultimate celebrity experience with your very own exclusive paparazzi.”
KIDS – “It’s his word against mine,” Katie protested. “Why do you always take his side?”
Every kid, Meghan thought, is a frustrated lawyer, finding loopholes, demanding impossible levels of proof, attacking even the most minute of minutiae.
PHOTOGRAPHER – Many things make a photographer, but in his case, it was more about need than want. He didn’t really see or process things unless he could photograph them. He saw the world through that lens. For most people, something doesn’t exist unless they see, hear, smell, taste it. For him it was almost the opposite – nothing was real until he captured it in his camera.
COSMIC PUZZLE – During a teen tour to Florence, Italy, she remembered visiting the famous Duomo cathedral in the center of the city. On the ceiling of the dome were frescoes, depicting the most gruesome scenes of hell. Here, in a sacred church where you were not allowed to wear shorts or sleeveless dresses, there were naked people – sinners – having hot pokers inserted into their rectums and private parts. Clear as day. Easy for any tourist to see.
POSSESSIVE CHARACTER – “Both men were the very possessive type, if you know what I mean.”
Broome knew all to well what she meant. He’d seen the possessive type too many times in his career – overly jealous, short fuse, mistakes control for love, always holds the girl’s hand in public like a dog marking territory, chock-full of raging insecurity that he’s trying to mask in the macho. It never ends well.
PAST – She had a past. He knew that. So did he. Everyone did, he supposed. You come to a new relationship shedding the skin of the old ones. That was a good and healthy thing.
FACEBOOK – “They got two sons. I saw all these pictures of them on Facebook. They did some Carnival cruise last year. They go to Reds games. She looks really happy.”
“Everyone looks happy on Facebook.”
“I know, right? What’s up with that?”
STATE OF OUR NATION – We are told, for example, by our unhappy, miserable parents, that the way to find joy in life is to live and do exactly as they have. Barbie never understood that logic. What do they say about the definition of insanity? It is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Generationally the world seemed to do just that.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
