The Daily Sabbatical

I bought this book on the strength of the dustjacket blurbs.  Thom Jones, Dan Chaon, Julie Orringer, Kevin Brockmeier, Adam Johnson and Peter Orner all write as if this is the debut novel we’ve all been waiting for.  It also promised to be a genre bender of the sort that has increasingly gained in popularity (in no small part, I think, due to the encouragement of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.)  A young cop with rich brat high-school friends patrols the cemetery garrison of San Francisco and finds himself waging a war against a band of dead criminals.  Ok, cool enough.  Brett Easton Ellis meets Raymond Chandler meets Stephen King.  Sounds great if author Doug Dorst can pull it off and all blurbs point to the fact that he does.

He doesn’t.  It’s not that Dorst is a poor writer.  He’s clearly talented, and he has the makings of some very good work here.  As it stands, however, the book seems like a patchwork of false starts and unfulfilled promises.  There are simply too many narrative strands here that don’t get fully woven into the tale and that set expectations that don’t get met.  The ghost story remains temptingly in the background, and never really gets, um, fleshed out.  Our hero, Mike Mercer, has problems in his relationships to just about everyone, and while this is really the central theme of the novel, there’s little sense that he is discovering anything interesting about himself or others in the process.  We know he is estranged from his father, for example, and the old man appears to be in the neighborhood, or so we have it from the testimony of Mercer’s friends, but nothing happens.  It completely drops, only to be alluded to in the unsatisfying wrap-up as one of many things which will be resolved by the good will and bonhomie that constitutes the novel’s ending.

Writing a genre crosser is dicey, because genre’s bring along expectations.  In crime novels, we want to get to the crime, and it can feel distracting if we are burdened with too much romance, and in horror stories (which this doesn’t pretend to be, really) we want the creeps, so character development can actually get in the way.  It’s like porn with a plot: yes, yes, we know there is a mystery on the estate, but let’s get back to the butler and the chambermaid!  Genre-blending can be done, but it’s damned difficult and Alive in Necropolis doesn’t hit it.

So, why all these blurbs?  After several pages I realized: I know Chaon and Jones have Iowa Writers’ Workshop ties.  What about Dorst?  Yep: from the workshop.  The same with Orringer, Brockmeier, and Peter Orner. So, five out of six of the book’s blurbs are from the workshop at Iowa!  C’mon, guys!  So, a word to the wise: when reading book blurbs, keep an eye out for home cooking.