Eeriness

There was this day when we had a couple things that required us to drive to the fringes of the suburbia. It's only about 25 miles, but since I stopped commutning 100 miles a day, this counts as a road trip. The editor-in-chief in our house had to have a manuscript printed for a client. kinko's (or whatever it's called these days) seemed like the logical choice, even it meant a road trip. There's a Barnes and Noble store across the parking lot from the copy center, so I knew I could keep myself amused.

While the photocopy machine was pumping out paper copies of a perfectly good digital file, I wandered the bookstore, bought a copy of Tana French's The Likeness, bought a coffee, and settled down to read.

Last August, I read a couple of Tana French's books (In the Woods and Faithful Place) and really liked them. Since the beginnings of her books were especially good, I looked forward to the beginning of The Likeness and the bookstore coffee.

I wasn't disappointed.

If French hooked me with gorgeous images and attractive characters at the beginning of her other books, she got me with a plot device at the beginning of this one. Imagine a couple of undercover cops creating a false identity so one of them could go undercover to investigate drug dealing at an Irish university. Making up a family and background that couldn't easily be traced and creating certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the name of the new, fictitious person, Lexie Madison. The investigation goes pretty well, but the undercover cop has to rescued after being stabbed by one of the druggies.

Fast forward a few years and the young cop who had gone undercover, gets a call about a murder, even though she's not working homicide. The victim is a university grad student named Lexie Madison. And the corpse is a dead ringer (pun resisted, but not avoided) for the former undercover cop. Because of the circumstances of the death, the young cop is asked to once again assume the identity of Lexie Madison and help find her murderer. (This seems like a very Shakespearean plot device.)

Ready for this? How do you learn enough about someone to successfully step into her life? Her habits? preferences? speech patterns? academics? love life? finances? And then move back into the house she shared with four other grad students?

Some of the details are glossed over and others ignored. French compensates by once again creating attractive characters and incredible dialogues. The story is told mostly in real time dialogue from the perspective of the undercover cop. That may be the flaw. Coversation is a slow way to tell a story, even when the story teller is as good as French. There's pretty steady high level of tension in the story telling (the undercover is continually tempted to become Lexie Madison), but little variation. A few crises might have helped. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the outlines of the conclusion were pretty clear, but there was still a lot of book to read (total 466 pages in my paperback copy). And knowing in general what was coming made approaching the climax laborious.

But, I couldn't bring myself to skip ahead. I wanted to "hear" those conversations and explanations. French kept dragging me back into relationships that made up the stories of Lexie Madison. In spite of having to slog through the swamp of the ending, I really liked this book.

Have you read The Likeness? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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• Tana French's web page for The Likeness
• J. Robert Lennon's review of The Likeness at Ward Six
• Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
• Barrie Hardymon's review at NPR Books

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Families: can't live with 'em; can't live without 'em

The other familiar name I found at the library was Tana French. Well, of course it was familiar, I just read In the Woods two weeks ago. This time I found Faithful Place and decided to see if French had written a book as good as the first one.

I have come to the conclusion that French must spend a lot of time on the beginning of her books. I wasn't lured in by the first paragraph this time, but by the first two pages. I once again felt drawn into her story and quickly became interested in the characters and what was going to come next. The opening scene, by the way, describes a film noir foggy night on the outskirts of Dublin and Frank Mackey, a young man waiting for the young woman he's about to elope with.

That's the beginning of the background story. The contemporary story takes place 22 years later and the young man from the first scene is the main character. All those years later, Frank's a cop who gets involved in the investigation of the disappearance of the girl who never showed up for the elopement.

He's also a guy surrounded by families. There's the family he grew up in and from whom he estranged himself. And there's the erstwhile family of his daughter and his ex-wife. Oh, and I suppose there's also the family at the cop shop that he's sort of part of.

This stories in this book are really frameworks for exploring what families can do to their own. Frank ran away from his family even though his intended never showed because he knew it was deadly and feared what it might do to him. His erstwhile intended's family isn't much better. The situation reminded me, in less dramatic and less drastic ways, of how my parents distanced themselves (and their children) from most of their families. They'd seen conflicts and nasty behavior and kept in close contact only with most of their parents. So Frank's absence from family for a couple decades is understandable to me. And after reading French's version of family life, I have trouble imagining why all of the people in the book's families didn't run away.

There's really not a lot mystery in this plot and only a bit of suspense. But the way French tells the story and gradually reveals more and more about the characters kept me reading once again. Unlike Coel's The Silent Spirit, I never resisted going back to read more when I had the opportunity.

The ending is a bit romantic (like Coel's), but I can live with that. If French pursues the story line suggested in the conclusion, I expect it will be less romantic, since most of her stories are grittily realisitc.

I liked the book. I didn't think it was as good as In the Woods, but I'll pick up French's second book (Faithful Place was the third) if I find it in the library.

Have you read Faithful Place? If you have, write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted to it.

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• Tana French's web page for Faithful Place
• Karen Ballum's review at BlogHer
• Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
• Laura Miller's review at Salon (wish I'd written this one)

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Stories to read

The other book I checked out during my last trip to the Northfield Library was Jana French's In the Woods. I wish I'd kept track of where I learned about this book. I'd like to thank someone for the recommendation. As it is I have no idea how this book ended up on my "to read" list.

After the last two books I tried to read and didn't finish, I really wanted a book to like.

French won me over on the first page. Her prose and the images she created with them were wonderful. Let me quote:

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasking of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it backs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants.

I know, I've said I'm a reader who likes stories. What French did was snare me with a gorgeous scene. On page 3, she begins telling one of the stories in the book. And she does tell stories well. One of the stories is an awful story of the disappearance of two 12-year-old children that happened a dozen years before the other stories. Oh, and when those three children went mising, a third child survived without memories of what happened. Another story is about a young policeman who has achieved his professional goal of becoming a homicide detective. There's also a story about the relationship between the detective and his partner, who is a smart, mouthy, and very competent woman. The primary story is about the murder investigated by these partners.

In the first third of the book, the detectives' partnership reminded me of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Gal Friday. The smart dialogue and the knowing cooperation is a joy to behold. It changes after that, and I didn't like as I was reading, but in the end, the changes made sense and offered a bit of realism to the fiction.

The story about the children who went missing is told partly in flashback and partly in the words of old police reports. The linkage is that the detective was the child who survived without memories.

The mystery is complicated and intriguing, if murder can be intriguing. It's a major case and a whole raft of characters are drawn into the situation. A third detective joins the main pair and is almost immediately a part of the screwball comedy dialogue.

The last half of the book tells the story of the dissolution of those amazing relationships and the investigation into the details of the murder. It's well done.

I liked the characters. I enjoyed the telling of the story. I came to accept the development of the characters, even though they changed from the very attractive people introduced early in the book.

Also, after struggling unsuccessfully to wade through two books, I not only read this one, but I read it eagerly.

Tana French remains on my 'to read" list. She's written two more books since this 2007 first novel. The other two are also in the Northfield Library. I look forward to checking one of them out.

Have you read In the Woods or another French's books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• Tana French's web site
• Maxine Clark's review at EuroCrime
• Beth's review at Bookworm Meets Bookworm
• Marilyn Stasio's review in The New York Times

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