The Big Picture
By Douglas Kennedy
Hyperion, 374 pages, $23.95
There’s a certain etiquette in the reviewing trade that usually obtains: You don’t come down too negatively on first novels. If you don’t like the book, just keep silent. But in these days of inflated publicity campaigns for ordinary books, complete with souped-up advertising budgets and the sort of desperate language that we traditionally have associated with the selling of soap products and over-the-counter remedies, a reader-reviewer sometimes feels the need to fight back.
That’s certainly the case with this first novel, “The Big Picture,” by Douglas Kennedy, an American journalist based in Europe. The publisher is putting so much money and effort into its advertising campaign that I’m tempted to review the publicity rather than the book itself. But I’ll rein in that urge and look directly at the novel, or should we call it the product? It is a perfectly empty thriller in two parts about a frustrated (at work and in marriage) middle-class Connecticut man named Ben Bradford. Bradford is a senior partner at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. When he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him, he murders her lover in a fit of anger and then stages the corpse’s and his own disappearance. In the second half of the novel he takes on a new identity and moves west, always looking over his shoulder, hoping to make a new life.
For all of his murderous violence, Bradford is as conventional a character as we can get, a time-server, reminiscent of the ordinary and conventional wisdom that we have come to associate with Sloan Wilson’s famous “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Having given up his youthful dream of making his way as a professional photographer, he settled in to his father’s business, the law, conspiring with his wife, a failed novelist, to make a neat, middle-class family, with two small children, in the heart of suburbia. But in Kennedy’s rather unsteady fashion, Bradford’s unhappiness emerges as a sort of college-boy cynicism. “I never believed I would end up living in a house with a television in the kitchen,” he says, watching what he refers to as “McNews, a.k.a. CNN.” Photography, having become his hobby rather than his vocation, serves as his only release. His wife has found her release in other ways. When he discovers her adultery and commits the murder, Bradford quickly works out a plan to stage his own death and take on his victim’s identity. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit thus becomes a version of The Fugitive.
By this time, I wanted to flee from these pages. The tone was just too flat and the sentences all-too-literal, despite an amateurish striving for metaphoric power. When, for example, Bradford’s wife, coming to visit her (unbeknownst to her) now-dead lover, nearly discovers her husband hiding under the dead man’s bed, he tells us, “my back (was) aching, my nervous system in extreme overdrive.” When he wants to become intense he sounds like a stale imitation of tough-guy fiction: “I drove all night. I drove all day. I kept myself awake by popping Dexedrine and mainlining gas-station coffee.”
Despite the poverty of style, there is always the possibility in a novel such as this that the writer might show us something interesting about the human soul under duress. As it turns out, having murdered his neighbor and abandoned his children, Bradford dwells on his worries about being captured but seems to feel no remorse either about the killing or deserting his two small sons. Gaining weight by living on roadside fast food troubles him more than having slain a man and cut him into pieces of a size convenient enough to stuff into a sailboat stowage compartment.
So at the levels of both language and character the book seems quite empty and false, with Kennedy’s effort at making a thriller somewhat like Bradford’s attempt at putting up wallpaper in the apartment he rents in the Montana town where he tries to reinvent his life. “My initial attempts at repapering were moronic,” he says. “After a roll buckled, one living room wall looked like a textured collage. Another wall seemed fine until the glue dried and a network of bubbles appeared on the surface of the paper. I had to strip it all off and start again.”
In a cheap paperback edition, the kind you regularly used to find on the drugstore rack, this novel might have helped a depressed and lonely reader, someone, say, trapped in a mountain cabin with nothing else available to read except the labels on soup cans, to pass an otherwise drab hour or two. Sorry to breach the reviewer’s etiquette and say this, but for nearly $25 in hardcover, Kennedy’s trumped-up thriller can only seem like a version of consumer fraud. McNews? McFiction!
