"The Likeness," and Weird Friendships

I just finished Tana French's follow-up to the wonderful In The Woods, which instantly became one of my favorite crime novels ever when I read it a couple of weeks ago. In my review of that book on this site, though, I failed to mention a few elements which suddenly cast sharp shadows in the light of the new book, The Likeness. The previous book is a first-person narration, from the point of view of Rob Ryan, a Irish homicide detective; a significant part of the book elaborates upon his unconventional friendship with his partner, Cassie Maddox (the first-person narrator of The Likeness).

Ryan and Maddox, in that first book, have a platonic relationship of unusual intimacy. Ryan is always sleeping over on Maddox's couch; they know everything about each other, and clearly find one another attractive. Everyone assumes they are an item, and Ryan almost never mentions any feelings for another woman--until the novel's last third, where, blinded by his attraction to a suspect, he makes a huge mistake that blows the case. He also blows the friendship, by sleeping with Maddox, then cruelly shunning her friendship.

In the new book, Ryan does not appear. But Maddox mentions their night together. I've brought the book back to the library already, I'm afraid, but she says something like "He wanted to sleep with me; I let him." It's more complicated than that, of course, and part of French's appeal is her skill at unreliable narration. Ryan and Maddox are onto themselves, but not quite as much as they think.

In The Likeness, we have a bizarre premise: back when Maddox was an undercover cop, she and her supervisor invented a girl named Lexie Madison for Maddox to inhabit, in order to crack a college drug ring. Now Maddox is off the homicide squad and is working domestic violence, and she gets a call from her boyfriend, another homicide cop: come to a crime scene immediately, there's something you have to see. The something turns out to be a young woman, dead in an abandoned cottage: she looks identical to Maddox, and her ID says Lexie Madison.

If that seems implausible, what happens next is even more so: Maddox goes back undercover as the dead girl, moving in with the girl's four housemates, who have been told she wasn't dead of her stab wound, but merely in a coma. She is supposed to infiltrate their web of friendships in order to discover who really killed Lexie Madison--and who this Lexie Madison really was.

Well. Let me say right off that I loved this book, and found it every bit as absorbing as its predecessor. But the premise isn't merely hard to believe: it's impossible to believe. It simply couldn't, wouldn't ever happen. If this is likely to bother you, don't read it, because it's really the one flaw in an otherwise spectacular, and superbly written, crime novel.

The interest here isn't the plot, though. It's the friendships. Lexie's housemates are a group of disaffected graduate students who co-own a decrepit mansion and spend every single second of their time together. One's a girl, and one is gay, but they aren't lovers, and they don't seem to have lovers outside the group, either, or even other friends. They have a "no pasts" rule--any conversational references to their lives before they met are strictly forbidden. They cook meals together, and in the evenings they sit around the parlor reading and playing cards. None of them owns a computer or television. They're inveterate weirdos, in other words--and Maddox, who had to drop out of college ten years before when a rumormongering psychopath destroyed her social life, falls for them in a big way. The real story of this book is the story of Maddox going native, actually coming to love this quartet of suspects, and trying to convince herself it's all part of the job. In the end, she cracks the case, but that isn't the only thing that cracks, and the happy ending with boyfriend Sam is intentionally undercut by a minor chord.

Anyway, after In The Woods, I wouldn't have identified Weird Friendships as French's subject. But perhaps it is. It's a good one, too, as I can't think of many other books that embrace it so completely. Maybe The Haunting of Hill House, or some of Ruth Rendell's nonseries thrillers. I'm also surprised we don't see it more often--after all, how many relationships fall neatly into our commonest categories for them? How many relationships are completely nonweird? Not many. This is my Topic Of The Week, and I'm going to write a story about it immediately.

Something awesome and something awful

Let's start with the awful, which is actually kind of awesome. It's this year's Bulwer-Lytton Prize winner, penned by a guy with the delightfully implausible name Garrison Spik. Here's his entry:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

As I think I've said before, I'm actually not a great fan of this contest--they generally pick something too absurd to be funny. The ones I like are the ones that seem as though they might actually have been written in earnest, and are earnestly bad. Mr. Spik's fits the bill, at least until the mention of Piscataway. That's too Borscht Belt for my taste, I'm afraid, but the rest I like.

The awesome is Tana French's debut crime novel In The Woods, which was recommended here by reader Elizabeth. This book has a striking cover, and for weeks I had picked it up over and over at Rhian's store, hoping it would be good. But it opens with what I thought was a terrible piece of writing--a gratuitously lyrical, pretentious two-page preface--and I couldn't make it past. Elizabeth's recommendation sent me back to it, though, money in hand, and as it happens, the preface is not only pointless--it isn't remotely like anything else in the book. Indeed, the writing in this book is superb, and the novel is literary above all, by which I mean it is most concerned with the mental journey of its narrator, a detective-in-denial named Rob Ryan who, at age 12, was the victim of a crime he can't remember. When a new, creepily similar crime occurs in the same place, and it falls to Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox to investigate it, they decide to keep Rob's past a secret and let the case take them where it may.

It takes them places they don't want to go, of course, and French unravels both mysteries (to varying degrees of completeness), and their complicated relationship, with the skill of a seasoned veteran. The characters are marvelous, the plot is thrilling, the sentences are focused and agile, and the ending is audaciously maddening.

There's a blurb from USA Today on the back of the paperback, BTW, that ought to have been deleted in the pipeline. "Readers who like their hard-boiled police procedurals with an international flair will love In The Woods." Actually, no. The book is not remotely "hard-boiled"--it's humane and nuanced; and there is no "international flair" at all. The book takes place in Ireland, but what it's about is local politics, small towns, and the universality--and banality--of evil. There is no gratuitous travelogueing, nor divorced alcoholics listening to bebop. The reviewer seems to have randomly picked some cliches out of a marketing manual. It reminds me of the time I was given some flap copy for a book of mine, which described as "beautiful" a female character I myself had described, in the actual novel, with the word "unbeautiful."

In any event, French's new book, The Likeness, is on my bedside table, and Piscataway is in my travel plans.