Get Rich Quick

Ravens
by George Dawes Green
2009, Grand Central Publishing


When I was in junior high, I devoured any and every Michael Crichton novel I could get my hands on. His Dickens-long opuses filled some adolescent need I had for vicarious thrills, chills, and occasional moralizing. As an adult, I have learned that Crichton's novels are too, well, expertly programmed for my enjoyment now. Re-reading his work elicits none of the nostalgic charm I get from Agatha Christie, another childhood favorite.

I am very much interested in reading thrillers, particularly expansive inventive ones. But as I read more, my standards for literate, moving prose get higher and higher. Ravens does not meet those standards. George Dawes Green, its author, writes as though he learned to read from John Grisham movies.

The plot revolves around a trashy Southern family who win the lottery. The mother, as depressing and cartoonish a lush as any on Lifetime, plays religiously and her continuous losses on further her spiral of depression and worthlessness until what Dawes Green might call 'the fateful night' when her fortunes are 'seemingly reversed' and she hits it big - to the tune of 816 million dollars.

The plot 'thickens' when two aimless degenerate types stop at the convenience store where the winning ticket was sold and 'hatch a plan' where they will take the family hostage and concoct a ridiculous story to cover how the state should award half the winnings to the more confident of the pair, Shaw McBride (a name seemingly pulled from a Rolodex of potential movie villains).

Mr. Dawes Green's first 'fatal flaw' is his failure to elaborate on the backstories of these two gentlemen. It is understood they are involved in some way in computer programming and have trouble maintaining jobs or social lives. What these gentlemen are doing on the road trip that delivers them to the home of the winners - the improbably named Boatwrights - is as much a mystery as is their personalities.

Although it seems unfair to compare Dawes Green to as practiced a storyteller as Stephen King, I am reminded of Mr. King's work in reflecting on the missteps at the beginning of this novel. Where King's novels - The Stand, for example - spent dozens and sometimes hundreds of pages slowly building suspense and creating elaborate, Dickensian character histories, George Dawes Green spends next to no time getting his plot underway.

King's novels build suspense in the period it takes him to establish scenarios and locations and while King often plays into the Crichton-like gimmick of beginning his stories with little cliff-hanger episodes, his novels are deceptively leisurely at their beginnings. Dawes Green's first twenty pages demonstrate a distinct impatience to 'cut to the chase' and get burdensome aspects of novel-writing like character development and narrative exposition.

The plot continues as the mystery men take captive the Boatwrights and, unsurprisingly, Stockholm Syndrome strikes. The rest of the events are as hackneyed as this plot twist might suggest, with the notable exception of a 'from left field' development whereby Mr. McBride becomes a prophet of sorts and the family's deeply Southern values are confused by their current trials and tribulations and Mr. McBride's charisma. Consequently, the villain becomes increasingly introspective and disconnected from reality and waxes philosophically about his finally finding a purpose and meaning to his life.

Dawes Green's prose is clumsy at best. His unfortunate habit of typing, for instance, anyone yelling in caps is amateurish and vaguely reminiscent of poor online fan fiction. His sentences are frequently flabby and while he thanks his line editor in the acknowledgements for "teaching him to write", I would be embarrassed at being recognized as the woman who gave the okay on this gem: "Claude never winced but was stoic throughout."

The general laziness in the editing does not end at conjunctions. Inexplicably, Dawes Green shifts at odd moments from third to first person. It is unclear to me if this is intentional, as though trying to demonstrate the author slipping so close to the character's thoughts that they become one, but in any event the technique (if I can be charitable enough to call it that) is utilized so infrequently the effect reeks of nothing but laziness. Take this passage, for example:

He drove to his favorite hiding place on Rt. 17, near the Spur, behind a mess of oleanders, and raised dutifully his radar gun. But today was a lucky day for speeders in Brunswick, Georgia, because he wasn't even looking at the numbers. All his thoughts were on Nell Boatwright. Now she'll be lost to me forever. Her son Mitch will buy her a mansion in the south of France, and she'll have tea with duchesses and play seven-card stud with Bea Arthur who will adore her drawl and her crazy piercing laugh, and she's lost to me. It's finished now. I'm done and I just ought to own up to that fact.

I am accustomed to authors choosing a voice and sticking with it. At the very least, considering his familiarity with caps, I would assume he'd know to use italics to communicate internal monologue. (I will only parenthetically direct your attention to the awkward syntax - "raised dutifully"? This is no e.e. cummings poem.) Of course, it only takes a little bit of flipping to find that Dawes Green does indeed use italics to communicate internal monologue (" ...you think about Romeo and Romeo's sickness and Romeo's bloodlust while I tap into the power...") So what gives?

At the very least, Ravens was a brisk read so my frustration with such lapses in editorial oversight were thankfully shortlived. I wish I could recommend it despite its shortsighted prose for its great plot but the only thing more cardboard in construction than its characters is the predictable twists and turns of its hackneyed plot. But as Mr. Grisham has demonstrated to his would-be protege, these are the very elements that make a fledgling writer a sum rivaling the Boatwrights' for his effort - or obvious lack thereof.