As intense and emotionally draining as your worst nightmare.

books:


	• The Keepers of Truth: A Novel Michael Collins Phoenix House, 2001 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

American Dream

Michael Collins gives an intriguing look into the mid-west America, offering an absorbing crime story/ dark comedy/ character study. Phil is a reporter from a local newspaper named "The Truth" who starts working on a murder case that happened in his town. The main suspect of the crime is Ronny Lawton, the victim`s son. Along with his newspaper mates Sam and Ed, Phil begins a complex investigation where he tries to prove Ronny`s innocence, since he thinks that he wasn`t the murderer. In the process, Phil develops a strange and unexpected relationship with Ronny`s ex-wife Teri.

Michael Collins manages to deliver a somewhat interesting crime story here, focusing the peculiar envoironment of an american little town as well. As the story evolves, the investigation scenario turns more confuse and complex, presenting intriguing new elements. Collins takes this situation as an example of the fall of modern civilization, using it as a starting point to deliver some thoughts and ideas about post-industrial systems. Although he raises some food for thought at parts, most of his observations soon become repetitive and tiresome, creating a couple of uninteresting and boring chapters that damage the flow of the book. The resolution of the murder investigation is also a weak element to the story, providing a disappointing and anticlimatic finale.

Despite its flaws, "The Keepers of Truth" is a gripping and relevant effort nonetheless, delivering a clever analysis of today`s societies and entering the shadow zone of the "americann way of life". As a whole, this novel is a witty and well-written work that drags in some moments and is a tad too long, but it suceeds in presenting the strenght of one of the best Irish writers around.

A keeper, indeed.

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Connect/disconnect

Bill is a washed-up reporter trapped in a place that he doesn't want to be. His inheritance from his father left him wealthy, but only on the condition that he stay put in the dying mid-Western town where he was born. He has no motivation beyond finding things to make his life there bearable. He is permanently inside, but by virtue of his money, permanently outside.

The murder that occurs gives Bill an at least temporary reason to get up in the morning, and provides the reader with an excuse to examine the details of small town life with clues that do not fit together and a crime which is, after all, a crime just like any other.

The qualities that earned this book a Booker nomination were obvious yoon reading. Collins is a skilled writer who manages to provide a smart, outsider look at small town life in the US. The tone and the plot work well together in the a palette of claustrophobia and surreality that never indulges in self-conscious tricks or far-fetched coincidences.

A fine book-- a read that made me want to find more by Collins.

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A Revealing Dark Vision of America by an Irish Writer

Bill, a law school dropout, is living in his home town because his cryogenically preserved grandfather has made it a condition of his will. Bill's father killed himself shortly before the he came home and he had a breakdown because of it and is slowly rebuilding his life, despite the break with his girl friend Diane.

He gets a job working for the dying town's dying newspaper, "The Daily Truth," which is run by two old men, Sam, the owner, and Ed, the paper's photographer. Sam and Ed believe Bill, who is somewhat of a wordsmith and given to fanciful prose, will someday turn out to be a good journalist.

Salvation for the newspaper comes when Ronny Lawton's father disappears. Lawton is a tattooed burger flipper at Denny's, who despite having reported his father's absence, becomes a suspect for the presumed murder. The case re-energizes the "Truth's" disillusioned staff, but the initial promise of a scoop for Bill gradually translates into an obsession with Lawton and his estranged wife. As the crime casts its shadow on the lives of his newspaper colleagues and on the nightmarish reverberations of his own father's suicide, it also begins to take on symbolic dimensions as many people in the town try to take advantage of the murder.

Michael Collins won the Irish Book of the Year Award for this book and it's easy to see why. It deserves the high esteem it has won in Ireland and I highly recommend it.

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As intense and emotionally draining as your worst nightmare.

Written with passion and fury, this novel is as unrelenting as a nightmare--you can't break out of it once you are in it, and you are compelled to see it through to the end. On the surface, it is a murder mystery and investigation, but at its heart, it's a bleak case study of a community which has died since its manufacturing industries shut down and the supports for its local economy collapsed. Everything which gave dignity, meaning, and focus to the hardscrabble lives of the inhabitants is gone. In the middle of a hot, dry summer in this community in the Dust Bowl, Ronny Lawton's no 'count father disappears, and Ronny, no Boy Scout himself, is generally assumed to be his killer.

Collins sets up the framework for his themes from the outset. The main character, Bill, is the grandson of a man who made his fortune selling ice, and later manufacturing refrigerators. Bill is working haphazardly for the local newspaper and living in the basement of the family mansion because it's the coolest area of the house during these brutally hot days. He is recovering from a breakdown and hospitalization following his father's suicide.

Ronny Lawton, to whom he is drawn, at first, as a newsman, is in many ways his opposite, though they share the bond of having lost their mothers and having had cruel fathers. Ronny lives in a shack and works at Denny's, where he takes pride in his designation as Employee of the Month. Except for Bill, who believes Ronny may be innocent, everyone--the local police, the FBI, the newpaper owner, and the claque of women at the local hairdressing salon--needs to find Ronny guilty to regain control of their lives. As the spirit of frontier justice grows and the need for a scapegoat becomes more pressing, Bill and Ronny both become caught up in the out-of-control spiral which soon engulfs them both.

The pace of the novel is unrelenting. The small-town dialogue is realistic, filled with petty resentments and jealousies. The prose is vivid, full of heavy, occasionally "purple," descriptions. The pathetic setting of a community which has lost every reason for being, and the hopelessness of the lives of its inhabitants, made obsolescent by the decline of manufacturing, make this a bleak reading experience. Collins's humor, however, saves it from bathos, and the psychological credibility of the characters and the excitement of the plot make this a book that I found impossible to put down. It's easy to see why it was a Booker nominee. Mary Whipple

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Booker Shortlistee Disappoints

Written by an Irishman living in America, this Booker shortlistee is a strange beast set in a Midwestern town during the long hot summer of 1979. (Some reviews place it in the early or mid-'80s, a curious mistake given the explicit allusion to the year on pages 94-5: "in a matter of months we would be watching our hostages under siege in Iran"). The book appears to be a stab at marking America's transition into hyperconsumerism and moral decay, but it's so chockablock with heavyhanded satire and symbolism that it's hard to figure out just what the intent is.

The story revolves around Bill, a 20something misanthrope who's returned to his hometown by default. Having bombed the LSATs, he's living alone in the ancestral family home his father committed suicide in, and working as the only reporter for the dying town newspaper, "The Truth." An ornery old man goes missing, providing a crime for Bill to become engrossed in, as the townspeople assume that the man's no-good son chopped him up after some kind of argument. (Is it meaningful that the suspect son is named "Ronny" and takes steroids? An allusion to the incoming President Reagan and the "muscular" foreign policy he would invoke?) Bill is the only one who thinks Ronny is innocent, and becomes entangled with Ronny, his estranged wife (an aspirational consumerist), and baby son (who only eats junk foot).

The use of the crime genre is a way for Collins to draw the reader in and keep them reading, but those expecting a neat resolution will be very disappointed. And perhaps that's part of the point, to subvert the reader's expectations just as his characters' expectations of the "American Dream" have been subverted by the shift of manufacturing to overseas. Heavy weather is made of the landscape of rapidly decaying closed factories in whose shadows drugs are dealt. Meanwhile, a semi-grotesque supporting character embodies the coming rise of the service economy, as she runs a mini-salon from her garage, mixing in other services which presage the "experience economy." Yet another running theme is the decline of print media and the rise of TV tabloid journalism.

All of this results in a mixed brew of social commentary which becomes rather repetitive and heavy-handed much of the time. There are large swathes of Bill's cynical interior thoughts that drag the book to a halt and tax the reader's patience. These are partially balanced by some quite fine descriptive passages and other bits and chunks. On the balance, though, it's pretty hard to see what all the fuss is about and it's oten hard not to feel like the book's "satire" is largely a matter of playing to European stereotypes about the American midwest.

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