When I finish a book that I’ve loved reading, my first thought is: Will Mom? My mother, like my son Evan, consumes books as though they are air, necessary for survival. She is always in a book, or five if none of them are pleasing. Unlike me, she’ll read an unlikeable book to its end.
In the past year I’ve sent or brought her Grace Coddington’s memoir, Ian McEwan’s The Children Act, John LeCarre’s A Delicate Truth, Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. For Mother’s Day I sent her Jonathan Miles’ Want Not, with a note that she would need to get past the first chapter, which can repel. She’s not a book snob: she’ll read rom coms my sister Liza picks up in airports.
One book I won’t be sending her is T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come. It’s a great read, but it’s too dark for her.
Here’s the story: Sten Stensen is a recently retired high school principal cruising the Caribbean with his wife of 40 years, Carolee. A bus ride to a nature walk in Jamaica turns deadly, when Sten and his fellow tourists are held up. Sten is a big man, a Vietnam veteran, and he does what he’s been trained to do: kill the enemy.
Celebrated, Sten and Carolee resume life in their Northern California home, with a sea view, bordering a redwood forest. Sten is bothered by the death he caused, and the press it attracts. Otherwise, theirs seems a sweet life, time for coffee together or a restaurant meal and too much wine. Then we meet their twenty-something son Adam, a mentally ill self-styled survivalist drug dealer, and Adam’s love interest, an anarchist named Sara, who’s in her 40’s.
What can I say? I love a train wreck and this one ends in the largest, longest manhunt in California history.
Boyle is an engaging storyteller, and this — his fourteenth novel — is a funny, smart, moving read. It’s just not for Mom.
Happy Mother’s Day.