Here is a book that wants it all – literary hurrahs as much as biblical quantities of readers, the holy grail of that most hopeful of subgenres, the “superior” thriller.
Does it deserve it? There are moments in this impressive, enjoyable novel when the author – a smart New York magazine editor and writer – threatens to square the circle of erudite noodling and throbbing action. At other times, however strong the reader’s sympathies with, say, the anatomy of bees or the seductive evils of the contemporary art world, you just want him to get on with a few stabbings.
The novel is a murder mystery set in the village of Orient, a rural community on the north-eastern tip of Long Island. It’s a familiar story of natives versus outsiders – plain-speakin’ folks raising their pitchforks against fashionable Manhattan types rolling up with their bags of money and nude sunbathing habits, turning respectable tumbledown clapboard hovels into desirable modern dwellings with sea views. How long before the place is another Hamptons for the snooty rich, heralding the end of family, birthright and tradition?
The tension, as they say, mounts: not all locals are on side; perennial apocalyptic rumours surrounding a nearby offshore bio-research facility are revived; and the arrival of Mills, a grubby 19-year-old Californian drifter and former foster kid with a presumed history of being the wayward sort, sends neighbourhood antennae into full twitch. When dead bodies start piling up, it’s Mills to whom jaundiced eyes are drawn (though the worst he has done is treat one of Orient’s surly teenage sons to a blowjob).
He is not without allies: there’s beige, avuncular fortysomething Paul, who found Mills asleep on the doorstep of his Chinatown apartment and naturally invited this barely communicative druggy young stranger out to paranoid Orient to help clear his old empty ancestral home of rubbish. Is Paul – notably “unmarried” – a regular nice guy, or does he just want to get into his house guest’s undershorts? Then there’s beautiful Beth, 35, who also takes a shine to the newcomer, though you’d think she’d have enough on her plate, what with her hidden pregnancy, crazy Romanian artist husband and clinging, Botox-addicted mother. But Beth and the boy are soon – perhaps too soon – thick as thieves, sneaking around the village and environs, determined to prove Mills’s innocence, with the help of a murder victim’s secret journal (the sine qua non of the sleuth’s starter kit).
There’s a vivid array of fellow residents – crossbow–toting hunters, real estate interests, adulterers, heritage fascists, gossips, drunks, louts, more crazy artists – with multifarious uncertain agendas and grainy backstories. (One hopes the inhabitants of the real-life Long Island village of Orient have a sense of humour.)
Christopher Bollen orchestrates these tumbling affairs with intelligence and boundless energy – here with a gothic cliffhanger, there pausing to describe for us what the act of peeling an orange looks like. His character portraits approach Franzenesque levels of detail, though he’s equally adept at miming the lurid gestures of the TV mini-series. There’s the occasional clunk of cliche.
But he has an ear for those well sprung sentences that so distinguish the best American fiction – and a cinematic eye for the big scene (a passage in which a house burns to the ground should be read out in creative writing classes).
Some readers may require a little more emotional pull with their suspense – Mills and Beth are easier to root for than to love; and even at its most visceral, there’s nothing in this novel that will leave you a gibbering wreck. And the final showdown – in which one character helpfully tells another what the hell happened – strikes a flat note. But these are quibbles in what is a real page-turner – and a classy one.
Phil Hogan’s latest novel, A Pleasure and a Calling (Black Swan), is now out in paperback.
Orient is published by Simon & Schuster (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.59
