Book review of "A Very Simple Crime," by Grant Jerkins

A VERY SIMPLE CRIME

By Grant Jerkins

Berkley. 264 pp. Paperback, $14

I'm not sure which is more interesting, Grant Jerkins's first novel, "A Very Simple Crime," or the ongoing saga of its emergence. Here's the latter, in brief, as the Atlanta-based author described it in an interview with Collin Kelley of Atlanta INtown magazine. Jerkins wrote the novel and submitted it to the Writers Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition. The novel won the fiction prize, and the group submitted it to agents and publishers but found no takers.

The author took over the quest and the rejections continued: "They all said essentially the same thing: It's too dark. There's no one to root for. We need a rootable character. I grew to hate the word 'rootable.' "

Then the miracle: The novel reached an agent who liked it and sold it to Berkley, which was previously best known for publishing cozies, i.e., mysteries for readers who don't like violence. "A Very Simple Crime" -- trust me -- is no cozy.

Good news and bad news followed. Screenwriter Nicholas Kazan liked the novel and proceeded to write a screenplay, in collaboration with playwright Terry Curtis Fox. Kazan sent the screenplay to director Barbet Schroeder, with whom he'd worked on the 1990 film "Reversal of Fortune" (both men were nominated for Academy Awards). Schroeder agreed to direct but thus far he has not found the money needed to proceed, perhaps because Jerkins's story is a good deal darker than even "Reversal of Fortune."

Just how unrootable is this novel? Well, the publisher calls it "dark, warped, and at times graphic" -- all true -- and advance readers have added "nasty" and "chilling." The novel is at best Gothic and is obsessed with madness, violence, sadism and revenge. The story centers on one gloriously dysfunctional family, the Lees of Atlanta: sinister Adam, who narrates much of the novel; his troubled wife, Rachel; his mentally disabled son, Arthur; and his brother, Monty, a lawyer whom Adam credits with teaching him, as a child, about "degradation, cruelty, and spite."

We learn at the outset that Adam is on trial for murdering his wife and that his brother is representing him. We return to the couple's courtship and marriage and in time learn whether Adam was in fact the killer or if the killer was his son or his brother, both of whom come under suspicion.

Adam, in his narration, does not hide the essential coldness of his nature. He says of his courtship of Rachel, "Her love for me, from the very beginning, was fanatical. . . . Can I admit it now? Can I acknowledge that on some level, even then, I was attracted to her mental illness? . . . Darkness is drawn to darkness." When Adam looks admiringly at a shopgirl, Rachel screams, rages, tears out her hair until her scalp bleeds. Adam rises to a senior executive job in his father-in-law's financial-services firm. Arthur is born and proves to have serious problems: "And when he reached age fourteen, we had the perfect five-year-old." Only after Albert smashes his mother's skull with a crystal ashtray is he institutionalized. Only after he kills his roommate there is he sent to a more punitive institution where he is kept semiconscious by powerful drugs. (The author, be it noted, works as an advocate of adults with developmental disabilities.)

Rachel's father dies and leaves her $40 million. She grows more unstable, drinks excessively and almost never leaves home. Adam considers divorce. Visiting his son, he finds a young nurse gratifying the boy sexually -- it relaxes him, she explains. Adam begins an affair with the nurse, Violet. When Arthur comes home for a weekend visit, Adam takes Violet to an isolated cabin where: "I commit unspeakable acts." Afterward, "she crawls to a cold dirty corner and weeps quietly."

Returning home, Adam finds his wife dead. Poor troubled, drugged-out Arthur ("this lumbering giant") seems to have killed her -- but this, of course, is Adam's version of events. Here, a quarter of the way into the novel, an embittered assistant prosecutor named Leo Hewitt enters the story. He has his own problems, having bungled a major murder case and almost lost his job. He decides that Adam killed Rachel, not Arthur. ("I don't think Junior iced Mom.") He persuades his superiors to bring Adam to trial. The novel becomes a legal thriller, with various surprises, as we try to puzzle out who did in fact ice Mom, but the legal battles are never as compelling as the horrific family portrait that begins the tale.

If you're looking for people to like or a hero to root for, you won't find them here. These are unattractive individuals who do terrible things to one another. But the story is well told and you have to admire the purity of Jerkins's writing: He's determined to peer into the darkness and tell us exactly what he sees.

Anderson regularly reviews thrillers for The Post.