Lost

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (2009: Doubleday).

In my continuing journey toward getting my first novel published, I've subjected several drafts to the scrutiny of many readers – friends, experts, potential agents and editors – several of whom of whom have been very generous with their time and advice. Through scores of critiques, rejections, and painstaking edits – even a few wholesale rewrites – my story has improved in nearly every way. The plot, the characters, the quality of the prose, even the sequencing of events gained sharper definition. Mistakes got caught, nuances developed, twists emerged and grew sharper. My novel, now two-thirds the original length, tells a better story in fewer pages.

For this reason, among others, I've resisted the temptation to self-publish. True to my "Extroverted" Myers-Briggs profile, I process information most effectively through interaction with others. The world is my editor.

It makes me wonder how I'll fare on the second novel, assuming the first ever finds its way into print. I've enjoyed many writers' debuts, only to become increasingly disenchanted with their subsequent works. Do successful writers eschew the long scrutiny we endure to get our first books' toes in the door, and thereby miss out on the myriad of ways to improve upon early drafts? No doubt the desire to never again have to jump through all of those editing hoops plays a role, as do publishing contract deadlines.

In this context I admit to having read all five of Dan Brown's novels, including his latest, The Lost Symbol. It may well be the last one of his I read. Brown reprises "brilliant symbologist" Robert Langdon's unlikely role as the solver of ancient mysteries, racing against the clock to save the world from disaster at the hands of a twisted soul seeking revenge for old wrongs. As usual, vast, secret, and therefore misunderstood societies use ritual and archaic symbols to maintain an air of secrecy that Langdon is uniquely qualified to decode. Or so we would think. At critical moments, the good professor gets stumped by mysteries that appear rather straightforward – or at least, they are simpler than the ones he so casually succeeded in understanding one scene before. The tactic is intended to build suspense, I suppose, but at times it just seemed to belabor the obvious.

Even more than The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbolis plot-driven and character thin. As usual, and thank heavens, the bad guys are more interesting than Langdon, although Brown does a good job of masking just how many nemeses the good professor is up against. Langdon himself is perhaps the least interesting main character ever to spawn a multi-million dollar series. Naturally he is unable to avail himself of the romantic offering Brown provides him. I wonder if, in a future issuance of this ilk, the author will provide his hero some relationship counseling.

Readers of Da Vinci – although perhaps not his earlier works, Deception Point and Digital Fortress – will recognize Brown's awkward writing – the clichés, artificial cliffhanger devices and manufactured misdirection to simulate suspense. Some of that goes with the genre. What is harder to dismiss is the overdose of repetition, the telling and retelling rather than showing character emotion and intention, and a series of long, tedious monologs. The result is a bloated story of 500 pages where 400 would do, and one that makes the reader work harder than the writer.

All could be forgiven if the stakes involved were both high enough and relevant enough to make the reader care, but unfortunately that isn't the case. Unlike Da Vinci or Demons, Symbol's crisis – the potential revelation of the secrets of the Masonic order, including the participation of national leaders in ancient blood rituals (yawn) – simply doesn't resonate. Even if one cared, the risk is revealed too deep into the story to enable the reader to invest in the crisis. Call me old-fashioned, but it shouldn't take me nearly 200 pages to figure out why I'm reading a book, even – or especially – that of a best-selling novelist. Nor should I have to endure fifty pages of talking heads explaining why I bothered to read the first 450. Once the threat to the main characters is resolved, a quick wrap-up of loose ends should be enough.

I wish I could say I was shocked by the sloppiness of The Lost Symbol, but the fact is that I was not. Brown's earlier novels were far more carefully constructed and tightly edited thrillers, if less dramatic. Da Vinci's breathless language and short, choppy, chapters with leapfrogging scene progressions made that story more accessible to the mass market reader, but required some spoon-feeding of key plot lines to keep all of its myriad details in play. Symbol continues and exacerbates those unfortunate trends. Unfortunately its plot is much thinner than its predecessors and as such is unable to carry the weight those devices add to the narrative. The story gets lost – and Robert Langdon is unable to rescue it.

I wonder what kind of book The Lost Symbol could have been had Mr. Brown spent the time to pare the story to, if not the bone, at least to the well-toned muscle. If Hollywood decides to create a two-hour screenplay out of it (and why not? The series is a money-maker), we may see an approximation of that. If not, then one can only hope that Mr. Brown finds some other incentive to return to the painstaking, difficult task of editing and revising his future work in the same careful way he did as a first-time novelist. We would all benefit from that.

Family Ties

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (2006: Vintage Books).

For most people, family relationships underlie all other relationships we form in our lives. You can choose your friends, the saying goes, but not your family. Sometimes that can be a blessing – most of us can remember a time when family members rallied to our cause against an unfair, evil world. Other times family can be a source of stress, misunderstanding, and heartache from which there is no escape. Having grown up as the seventh child in a brood of nine kids, there were times when all I wanted was for the people who knew me best to simply leave me the hell alone.

Under normal circumstances, family relationships are complemented by other relationships – friends, lovers, coworkers, even casual acquaintances provide alternative outlets for love, camaraderie, competition, and other healthy human interaction. When extreme situations strip away those alternative outlets, the peculiar strains, stresses and strengths of family bonds are put to the ultimate test.

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son's struggle to survive, extreme circumstances reduce the world of the two unnamed main characters to pure mutual dependence. The boy, at first innocent and vulnerable, depends on his father to steal food and blankets, seek shelter, continuously improvise new strategies for survival, and even, when the need arises, to kill. Less obvious but no less real is the man's dependence on the boy. The boy's presence brings to him a sense of responsibility and hope, and, we soon discover, of much-needed humanity. We're the good guys, right? the boy asks repeatedly. That's why we don't eat people, right? Right, says the man, and they walk away from fresh corpses, one day closer to the brink of starvation.

That the two depend on each other for their very survival is a point driven home in a myriad of ways both gentle and firm. We learn that the absence of the boy's mother was by her own self-sacrifice to motivate the man to take action to save the boy. But it also saved himself, for without her disappearance and his desperation to save the child he would have done nothing, and all would be lost. Time and again the man is motivated to improvise, to press on, to take extreme measures and improbable risks only out of his sense of paternal duty. Likewise, beyond the boy's diminutive size, his naivety prompts him to shame his father into sharing their meager supply of food and blankets with any passing stranger, placing them both at perhaps greater risk in their Hobbesian man-eat-dog world.

The lack of other relationships in their lives – except confrontational, violent ones – warp the perspectives of both man and boy on their trek to the sea. The boy, born after whatever apocalypse wiped out humanity and much of its infrastructure, innately senses that the cutthroat competition to survive is somehow not normal, and his hunger for healthy human contact exceeds the pain in his empty belly. The man, having known the love of a wife and family, neighbors and friends, remains at constant war with himself whenever another human crosses their path. Friend, or foe? Almost always he assumes foe. He must, but that is not the way it was, and he hates it. Is this all that his son will know? If so, why go through the trouble of surviving? Why not use the two remaining bullets on themselves instead of attackers, who could mercifully put them out of their misery?

The Road is typical of McCarthy's work in its economy of language, its rule-breaking narrative and grammar, and its minimalist punctuation and structure. The book for example, has no chapter breaks and nearly all dialog attribution is inferred from context. Yet the reading is not laborious because the writing is so well-paced and clear, and the narrative, while understated, packs such emotional wallop.

I nearly always pine for the ending of books – those I like, because I'm curious to see how the hero solves his dilemma, and those I dislike because I can't wait to be done with it. But I raced to the conclusion of this book for a different reason: I wanted the pain of this man and boy to end. I had grown to love them. There were, I realized when I turned the final page, like family. And in that moment I wanted them to know, I was here for them, the whole time.

The Crying Tree: The Far Reach of Family Roots

When I was sixteen, my family, me included, moved halfway across the country to a place with a climate, culture, and to some extent language very foreign to what I had grown up with. In the long run, the change of scenery did me a world of good, but at the time the entire world felt like a foreign and lonely place. I was sure my parents only did this because they hated me, or because they were crazy, or both. Such is the thinking of teenagers.

The truth was far more complex - or far more simple, depending on one's perspective. Driven by the dying construction boom in the northeast in the 1970's, we followed so many others into the prospering sun belt - and then, as the boom went bust in the American south, we again moved on. Some, like my parents and a few siblings, moved back to Massachusetts and the comfort of our family roots. Others, like me, explored new horizons. The reasons for these and subsequent moves were always equally compelling, to us if not to the casual observer.

Americans, more than the citizens of most nations, move their homesteads. We do it for reasons as varied as there are people. The effect on families, and individual family members, is unpredictable. This unpredictability can make for some excellent story-telling. Such is the case with first-time novelist Naseem Rakha's The Crying Tree.

The novel revolves around the family of Shep Stanley, a teenage boy killed shortly after Nate, the boy's father, moved them all from his wife Irene's childhood home to a remote town in eastern Oregon. Irene blames Nate for the tragedy and escapes into a self-imposed emotional exile, obsessed with the seemingly endless wait for the execution of Shep's killer, Daniel. The family returns to Illinois and each of them - Nate, Irene, and Shep's sister Bliss - retreat into their own emotional shells, a family in name and structure only.

After nineteen years, prison Superintendent Tab Mason informs Irene that Daniel's execution will finally happen - in four weeks. This sets in motion a series of revelations that shake the Stanley family to its core. Nine years before, on what should have been Shep's 25th birthday, Irene's aborted suicide attempt prompted her to re-evaluate her life. Rather than live for Daniel's death, she startles herself and the prisoner by writing him a letter of forgiveness. This leads to a secret nine-year correspondence that blossoms into an odd relationship, something akin to friendship.

The notice of execution brings to light not only Irene's secrets, but also some held by Nate that finally explain Shep's otherwise pointless murder and the boy's connection to the convicted man. Bliss, now a Texas prosecutor, intervenes in unexpected ways to help her estranged parents come to terms with the feelings they've long suppressed and have only begun to understand. The execution also challenges Superintendent Mason's uneasy truce with himself over his own buried family history, including his relationship with his estranged brother languishing in his own prison hell - on the other side of the wall, so to speak, from his law-abiding younger brother.

The Crying Tree is a story of violence and healing, of hurting and forgiveness, of loves discovered and lost and then, sometimes, rediscovered. It is the story of the complicated and often hidden relationships among people brought together by circumstances beyond their control - sometimes by a seemingly rash decision to move across the country, other times by decisions made by perfect strangers in relation to people brought close by sheer accident. Complex characters housed in the shells of simple people expertly interwoven by beautiful language and artful narrative bring The Crying Tree into vivid focus from page one. Rakha's writing reminds the reader that even what appears to be a cut-and-dried situation may contain nuances of meaning that often escape our attention at first glance - and that the bonds of family take many forms.

Recommended.

The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha (2009: Random House).