A BRIEF LUNACY
By Cynthia Thayer. Algonquin. 241 pp. $22.95
If bad things happen to good people in Cynthia Thayer's third novel -- and they surely do -- worse things happen to a good writer. A Brief Lunacy is being touted by its publisher as a literary thriller, but what's most thrilling about it is witnessing how poor the author's creative choices were here, and what stunted fruit they bear. It is a surprising departure for Thayer, who had previously written two small but sturdy novels, the first of which was published when she was 54.
Strong for Potatoes, Thayer's debut book, was a coming-of-age tale about a physically disabled girl who learns about her heritage from her Native American grandfather. The second novel, A Certain Slant of Light, paired a grief-stricken widower with a pregnant Jehovah's Witness on the run from her overbearing husband. While both works suffered from occasional heavy-handedness, Thayer managed convincingly to evoke her characters' strong emotions with a plain, earnest narration. What really enriched those books, though, were the vivid descriptions of the landscape and local work customs -- basket-making in the first book, sheep-shearing in the second -- within their shared locale: the woods and coastline of eastern Maine.
The new book returns to the same Down East milieu, but its atmosphere is altogether more claustrophobic, with few of the previous novels' enlivening external details. Jessie and Carl Jensen, an elderly married couple, have made a permanent home of their summer cabin after raising their three children and retiring from work as a history teacher (she) and a surgeon (he). Their peaceful withdrawal is interrupted by anxiety over their daughter, Sylvie, a schizophrenic living in a nearby psychiatric facility, whose erratic behavior includes setting things on fire and running away. Just after receiving word that Sylvie has a new boyfriend and has escaped yet again to be with him, Jessie opens the cabin's front door to a young stranger named Jonah who claims to have lost his way during a camping trip.
Against their better judgment, the Jensens allow the man to spend the night. As he grows increasingly agitated, he offers clues suggesting that he is seriously deranged. When he starts babbling about being chosen by God to know the Jensens intimately and to "prepare the way," one senses where this is going, and by the time he brandishes a pistol and a roll of duct tape, one knows for sure: The Jensens are about to be taken hostage by a madman in their own home.
Maybe this is not the oldest plot for thrillers of all kinds, but it is assuredly one of the most frequently used, in such films as "The Desperate Hours" and "Cape Fear" and such novels as Richard Bausch's In the Night Season and Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers. Every thriller must find a balance between honoring its often extremely restrictive conventions and shaking them up, although in Thayer's case she fails to do much with this standard-issue plot except follow it to its predictably bloody conclusion. The gun goes off several times before then, once fatally; there is a rape; Sylvie's arrival is anticipated but never transpires; time creeps ominously by; yet in between outbursts of Jonah's manic violence there is far too much empty time in a cramped space. When Thayer reaches for tautness in her story, there is arthritic stiffness instead and tedium where there ought to be chills.
In an effort to combat this ponderousness, the author does develop one show-stopping narrative conceit: giving Carl a Big Secret that Jonah forces out of him at length and at gunpoint. While Jessie has always known vaguely that Carl had "a hard time of it during the war," Carl is now terrorized into telling the story of his early life in Europe that she and their children never knew.
And really, what better way to prop up a failing suspense novel than with a rousing tale of the Holocaust? Of course, every subject is and ought to be available to artists for their creative use. But the primary purpose of a thriller is to entertain, and when an author chooses to impose this extraordinarily sensitive subject onto her narrative with the intention of eliciting thrills, she ought to do so less clumsily than Thayer does here, or risk stepping into the territory of the gratuitous. Even more lamentable is the author's subtle but unavoidable implication that the otherwise blameless Carl somehow deserves to be brutalized by a psychopath because he deprived his family of his true identity.
Thayer clearly did not intend to trivialize the Holocaust for a reader's pleasurable diversion, but she comes awfully close. There is no reason to assume that she meant to demonize the mentally ill -- the vast majority of whom are not unhinged sadists -- but she gets close here as well. And plainly she had no wish to deliver a shopworn narrative that never rises above its own clichés. But in hitting what amounts to a trifecta of bad taste and ham-fisted exposition, A Brief Lunacy has no hope of matching the level of Thayer's earlier, more vibrant efforts. •
Donna Rifkind writes frequently about contemporary literature.
