Reading a bestseller is at least partially a sociological experience as well as a literary one. It’s a snapshot of something that held the interest ofReading a bestseller is at least partially a sociological experience as well as a literary one. It’s a snapshot of something that held the interest of a sizeable number of people at a given time and gives the books so designated a kind of permanent distinction unrelated to any merits they may (or more often may not) possess as literature. The Fan Club made the list (just, at #10) in 1974, a year and a decade after “sexual intercourse began” (according to Philip Larkin), and the book seems to be in a kind of dialogue with popular contemporary novels on the subject of sex. It can be seen as a commentary on increasingly popular “bodice rippers” like The Flame and the Flower and Sweet Savage Love, and is perhaps an indication of a growing awareness of a dark side to sexual liberation not evident or emphasized in sex-positive books like Fear of Flying (which became a bestseller in paperback in the same year) and the non-fiction bestsellers Joy of Sex and More Joy of Sex; a year later Looking for Mr. Goodbar would be #4 on the list.
The Collector is an obvious predecessor here, but rather than Fowles' almost asexual abductor, Wallace gives us a cross-section of "red blooded" American males who very much have sex on their minds when they abduct the world-famous cinematic sex symbol Sharon Fields. After a far too lengthy set-up, once the abduction takes place Wallace quickly deflates the bodice-ripper fantasy, entering into Fields' point-of-view to give a realistic portrayal of her rape and her reaction to it. Once Fields realizes she is in a life-or-death situation, the novel becomes a kind of psychological thriller as Fields tries to manipulate her captors into a level of complacency in order to discover their identities and the location to which she's been taken. In Fields eyes, Wallace's cross section of US male types - the Writer, the Accountant, the Mechanic, the Insurance Salesman - also becomes a catalogue of male sexual dysfunction and self-delusion. (view spoiler)[Eventually, manipulated by the actress, the captors decide to demand a ransom for Fields' release and the last section of the book is a relatively straight-forward crime thriller, as plans go wrong and the conspirators turn on one another. (hide spoiler)]
I’m really conflicted about how to rate this book as a novel. It puts the reader through a number of reactions and it was only toward the end, (view spoiler)[when the plot fell into the heist-gone-wrong pattern, (hide spoiler)] that I had a good handle on where the story would lead.
In the early pages, the elaborate set-up and preparation for the abduction is reminiscent of heist novels like The Killing, the kind of story where the reader is encouraged to identify, to some extent at least, with the criminals. There also seems to be a perverse kind of throwback to boys adventure stories like Journey to the Centre of the Earth where a group a men with different skills and experiences team up to accomplish some adventuresome goal; I think Wallace intended this: at one point he explicitly mentions The Lost World and has named one of his protagonists “Malone”. But any identification established in the first section is shattered once the abductors turn into gang rapists – at that point the novel turns into a kind of adult American Lord of the Flies.
So, a well plotted book that keeps the reader off-balance for much of its length. And the story remains satisfying even when it takes a few predictable turns toward the end. But this book is atrociously written – far too many words are used to describe everything, much of it irrelevant, such as the interiors of rooms which are only briefly the scene of any action or the detailed movements making up inconsequential actions on the part of the characters. Because much of the action is seen through the point-of-view of the writer, Malone, to the extent of given extended excerpts from his notebooks, Wallace also indulges in frequent data dumps, stopping the action for some historical trivia or irrelevant elaboration of peripheral matters. An effective thriller could be made of this material that would probably be one-third of its published length....more
