Let Me Be Frank With You and the Literary Magic of Richard Ford

 

 

 

LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU (2014)

By Richard Ford

HarperCollins, 238 pages.

★★★★

 

Welcome to another book from my recent book fair shopping extravaganza. Richard Ford has long been a favorite of mine, though I confess his fiction is often on the cranky white male end of the literary equation. Lots of writers have alter egos, most famously Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) and John Updike (Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom); Ford’s is Frank Bascombe. In earlier books, Frank has been a sportswriter, a grieving parent whose oldest son has died, a divorcee, and a New Jersey realtor, but in Let Me Be Frank With You he’s a 69-year-old retiree in a happy second marriage. His greatest desire is to empty himself of his past and pretty much everything else that bothers him or requires effort.

 

This novel’s cover features the skeletal remains of the roller coaster at Seaside Heights, New Jersey, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In a case of the (not-so) great American pastime of historical amnesia, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy has faded from collective memory, but if you lived on the Eastern Seaboard anywhere from Jamaica to Ontario, Sandy took out power, produced floods, killed 254 people, and left billions of dollars of damage. (Remember footage of Vermonters kayaking along Montpelier streets by the State House?)

 

Frank was lucky, as a few years earlier he sold his Sea-Clift waterside dream house to Arnie Urguhart when made an offer he could not refuse. Frank hadn’t spoken with Arnie in ages before getting his request to come to Sea-Clift and advise what should be done with the remains of the house and ruined property. Despite the fact that Frank closed his realty office years ago, he is badgered into telling Arnie he’d be lucky to get $500,000 for the land.

 

What he doesn’t tell Arnie is that he has no desire to rekindle old clients or friendships, and that even being asked for an opinion is more mental effort than he cares to expend. Let Me Be Frank is not a novel in which much happens, rather a journey inside Frank’s thought bubbles. If you will, it’s an internal war between what Frank says and what he thinks. It’s a breezy read divided into four sections: “I’m Here,” “Everything Could Be Worse,” “The New Normal,” and “Deaths of Others.” Ford pared down themes to unleash Bascombe to be Ford’s mouthpiece for his opinions on scores of random subjects. They’re not really unrelated, rather they show us Frank (Ford) carries a lot of mental baggage for a guy who allegedly wants to unburden.

 

For those who might wonder why they’d wish to be part of some old guy’s rants, I offer this: There’s a reason that Richard Ford was a Pulitzer Price winner. He is a literary stylist, has an enormous vocabulary, and knows how to walk the tightrope between pathos and bathos (though parts of the books are quite funny), satire and maliciousness, awkwardness and overly mannered, and intrusion and genuine interest. Through it all, Frank at least thinks his mind, even when he feels the pull of social constraint not to speak it. I leave it to readers to determine whether Frank is disingenuous, disengaged, cowardly, intellectually lazy, or sensible. I will say, though, that the “Everything Could Be Worse” section is an incisive look at white liberal guilt. It unfolds when an older black woman rings Frank’s doorbell. Frank twists his liberalism into knots into how to deal with a woman whose family used to live in Frank’s house in Haddam when his neighborhood was black working-class rather than upwardly mobile white middle class. Frank parses his conversation, but is never sure if what he said was the right thing or unintentionally offensive. Through it all we can tell that he is working too hard to prove he’s not a racist.   

 

In many ways Frank is a fraud, but he knows and feels that. There is an air of toxicity in his attempt to be civil to his ex-wife, who is in a memory care unit; or attend the deathbed or a guy he only pretended to like.  Frank is either frank with himself or the kind of jerk he believes others to be. Again, it’s up to the reader to decide, though Frank wouldn’t care one way or the other! But the prose… the boldness… the style… Ford is a writer par excellence.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eugenics in Vermont

Vermont for the Vermonters: The History of Eugenics

            in the Green Mountain State (2023)

By Mercedes De Guardiola

Vermont Historical Society, 177 pages + appendices and back matter

★★★

 

 

 

When I was a high school teacher in Vermont, Nancy Gallagher was one of my favorite colleagues, even though she taught science courses and I was a social studies instructor. Years after I left, Nancy published Breeding Better Vermonters (1999), the first major work on the eugenics movement in Vermont.

 

Gallagher’s work concentrated heavily on Henry Perkins, who headed Vermont’s Eugenics Records Office for 11 years. Breeding Better Vermonters was a major inspiration for Mercedes De Guardiola, who looked deeply into available records across Vermont and published Vermont for the Vermonters. Guardiola would be the first to admit that even her study is incomplete as many records are missing–thrown away, destroyed by floods and fires, misfiled, or still undiscovered.

 

Eugenics is soiled by its association with racism, ethnocentrism, ableism, intolerance, and other now-unsavory assumptions. Because of its unsettling association with Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement is not broadly taught in the United States. Nor is it comfortable to acknowledge that eugenics passed for “science” in much of the Western world or that Hitler’s reign of hate drew upon American sources as well as European sources. Although adherents in Vermont and elsewhere argued that “positive” eugenics would literally produce better traits among humans, selective breeding was an ideal more suited to crops and livestock than humans. It thrived between the 1890s-1940s and its logical extension was to identify “subnormal” humans and prevent them from passing on their “defects,” either by voluntary or forced sterilization. In Vermont and elsewhere, chapters of the Ku Klux Klan endorsed eugenics. A large KKK rally in Montpelier during the 1920s was thus less shocking than one might assume. In retrospect, the truly shocking takeaway from Vermont eugenics is that so many educated and prominent luminaries embraced eugenics, including doctors, college presidents, governors, women’s club members, judges, scientists, and other professionals. 

 

De Guardiola pored over records from the Waterbury Hospital, the Brandon Reform School, the Perkins-led Eugenics Survey, state records, gubernatorial speeches, newspapers, and Vermont Country Life Commission reports. Among the many contradictions of eugenics is that “improving” the human race involved identifying those who would drag it down. Vermont eugenics dovetailed with the 1931 Vermont Commission on Country Life, whose 1931 Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, sounded the warning that the state’s “Old Stock” was in decline, which in turn threatened to alter Vermont’s special rural characters. Thus, other commissions on everything from potatoes, apples, poultry, and dairies to woodworking, tourism, land use, and “religious forces” voiced opinions on eugenics. In essence, what was at stake was old-time Vermont versus emergent Vermont. The Old Stock was Protestant, Yankee, and rural. Eugenics targeted those of supposedly low IQ, but it was far too easy to assume that African Americans, French Canadians, Catholics, Native Americans, mixed bloods, delinquents, epileptics, the poor, and the under-educated were prone to mental deficiency. Not to mention unscientific assumptions that retardation and intelligence were genetically based. Today, many would also find it distasteful to deny the right of procreation to those of lower IQs or physical challenges. (Some genetics advocates did allow for the possibility that “high grade imbeciles” and “morons” could perhaps handle family life, but not “idiots” or “low grade” and “medium” imbeciles. 

 

Classification also lacked academic rigor. The Eugenics Survey of Vermont highlighted six “families”–the “Pirates,” the “Gypsy,” the “Chorea,” the “Doolittle,” the “Rector,” and the “Furman.” Of these, the first three were not families at all, rather generalized collectives to describe those who lived on boats, travelers and peddlers, and those poor souls driven insane by Huntington’s Chorea. Nor is the data from the latter three biologically-related families consistent, as some family members led quite productive lives.

 

It would be far too simplistic to condemn all eugenicists as bigots. I reiterate that eugenics passed for science at its height. Science is a dynamic field in which rigorous observation drives conclusions until new tools and methodologies proves them wrong. I am a historian, not a medical doctor or scientist. I would say, though, that one of the jobs of a historian is to warn citizens to ask hard questions lest the errors of the past repeat themselves. Hats off to my old friend Nancy Gallagher and to Ms. De Guardiola for illuminating the dangers of predetermined assumptions.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

  

Fail Mary: A Good Book Badly Interpreted

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2016)

Directed by Phil Lord and Christoper Miller

Amazon-MGM Studios, 156 minutes, PG-13 (intensity, mention of suicide)

★★

 

Project Hail Mary was a megahit, but the film gets very little love from me. It is ever-so-loosely based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir (no relation of mine). Weir’s book was quite good, an exemplar of what is sometimes called a “hard science novel.” It was also “hard” in the sense that Weir didn’t shy away from throwing math equations, chemistry, and physics at his readers. Those things are also present in the movie, but it’s ultimately a buddy film between astrobiologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a xenon-based alien nicknamed “Rocky” (James Ortiz voicing a rather obvious puppet).

 

The story is rather straightforward. Grace is a wise guy scientist whose nonconventional behavior and lack of ambition have wrecked his chances of working at any sort of high-powered university or research lab. He has been reduced to teaching middle school science and he’s really good at it; it fits his slacker-like demeanor. He is, however, aware of the frightening buzz over mysterious celestial dots, the infrared “Petrova line” extending beyond Venus, and rumors that is has been sucking radiation from the sun at such a rate that within 30 years tens billions will die from global freezing.

 

Ryland is commandeered to do research on astrobiological problem he wrote about when he was a serious graduate student. Somehow this makes him the world’s expert above those malingering deadbeats at crappy schools such as Arizona State, Cal Tech, Colorado University, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and university labs in Beijing, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Tokyo. Ryland almost immediately identifies that a microbe dubbed astrophage is the culprit. (How did those lab-coated dolts elsewhere miss it?) Ryland also realizes that the scenario is much worse than a frozen earth. The Petrova line upon which astrophage travels could wipe out all of creation, except for a faraway small planet named Tau Ceti. A team is needed immediately to be put into induced comas, go to Tau Ceti, determine why it is unaffected, and send probes back to earth–nearly 12 light years away. The odds of all this happening are so low that their spaceship is named “The Hail Mary,” a term that infers an act of desperation.

 

Ryland believes that his work is done, before Petrova Taskforce head Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) tells Ryland he is one of the three chosen for the one-way suicide mission. He protests that he is not an astronaut, doesn’t want to go, and isn’t ready to die. His refusal is ignored; the stakes are so high that he is forcibly sedated, plonked aboard, placed in a coma, and wakes up 4-5 years later (roughly 13 years by earth time). Ryland is alone in space–both of his colleagues died in their receptacles–until he encounters a giant array. After some gawking, he approaches the array and eventually meets an alien he dubs Rocky, whose language is based on music and echolocation. (Shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)  The two learn to communicate and Ryland writes a computer program that allows them to “talk” to each other. Rocky, an engineer from the Eridani A system, is also alone in space, his 22 crew members dead from radiation exposure. Despite their linguistic, cultural, and physical differences, Ryland and Rocky become good friends.

 

From this point on, Project Hail Mary plays more like a buddy film than any sort of thoughtful first contact movie. (For my money, Star Trek: First Contact tops the thriller/insightful list.) Like almost all buddy films, there are funny moments–Ryland is a klutz and playful goof-off–times in which they save each other, mutual homesickness, and teamwork to stave off disaster. A lot of the “cute” cultural misunderstandings skirt the boundary between character development and cheesy. The bonding process is even worse, as in Ryland’s efforts to hug Rocky through his protective sphere. Not to mention that the Eridian Rocky looks like the Horta from Star Trek’s first season crossed with a Muppet decked out in sepia and ash.

 

I do give credit to Greig Fraser for his stunning cinematography. I wish the movie itself had been more worthy of Fraser’s craft. Andy Weir’s novel made me think; the movie made me sigh.

 

Rob Weir

John of John Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

 

 

 

 

JOHN OF JOHN (2026)

By Douglas Stuart

Grove, 400 pages.

★★★★★

 

In May, I was in England. Back in the States there was a discussion of what the “big” books of summer would be, a list peppered with schmaltzy romances, graphic novels, and the usual suspects (Collen Hoover, John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel…). In the U.K. the reading public anticipated John of John by Douglas Stuart. If the name rings a bell, he’s the author of Shuggie Bain, which won the 2020 Booker Prize for fiction. He followed with Young Mungo, which was highly regarded, but John of John is already shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Stuart is Scottish and lives in New York City part of the year with his husband. He has been called a queer writer, but mostly Stuart’s characters are complex people some of whom simply happen to be gay.

 

John of John is set on the remote Outer Hebrides Isle of Harris during the late 1990s. As for the title, in many places individuals introduce themselves according to their lineage. The novel’s main character calls himself “Cal,” but that’s short for John Calum McLeod. His father’s name is also John. As Cal ferries across The Minch to Harris, he is asked his name and replies, “John of John of Ian of Ian the Breabadair,” the last word meaning weaver. His recitation situates Cal within four generations. In a wee place like Harris, with a population of just 1,900 souls, this matters. It now adjoins the Isle of Lewis; though they were once separate islands, and are quite different. I’ve been to both and rock-strewn Harris looks as if the glacier just left last week.

 

Twenty-two-year-old Cal has been told that “Ma,” actually his grandmother Ella, is seriously ill. He leaves his art school in Edinburgh to care for her, only to arrive and find she is as feisty as a golden eagle. Speaking of birds, Calum actually means dove in Scots Gaelic, but you can be forgiven if thought it might mean Calvin, as in the dour Reformation figure John Calvin, whose Scottish acolyte John Knox was even more strict. Harris is one of the last toeholds of the Free Presbyterian Church–pronounced “kirk”– as “ch” is usually sounded as a hard K in Gaelic. There’s little that’s “free” about the predestination-centered Presbyterians of Harris. You can imagine that Harris is a hard place to be gay, especially when your sheep-farming father is a kirk preceptor and deacon with decided views on how one should observe religion and a white-hot temper used to smack the wrongdoing out of his son. Cal cannot tell his father of his predilections, even though he has committed several “sinful” acts between Glasgow and Harris. Ella has suspicions, but she’s decidedly not a kirk-goer, refuses to speak Gaelic, and curses worse than any of the island’s fishermen.

 

Only a handful of islanders know Cal’s secret. A childhood friend, “Doll” Macdonald, has been a partner during bouts of drunkenness, though even he shares the view that Cal might marry his fair, book-smart sister Isla. She would welcome that, but she reads Cal pretty well and pivots to wanting to escape Harris and attend the University of Glasgow.

 

John the Elder has a very good friend, the soft-spoken Innes MacInnes and he, too, will factor into the gathering drama. Harris might be sparsely populated place, but how many humans do you need for big secrets, raging passions, hypocrisy, and violent temperaments to raise mayhem? John of John is a sometimes-harrowing tale of isolation, repression, pain, and a father-son relationship. For all of his good intentions, Cal can be as cruel as his father, and that’s not the only way in which he hasn’t fallen far from the family tree.

 

This is not a novel that depends upon thrills, high-energy plotting, or mystery. We see most things through Cal’s eyes, but can he be trusted to curate how his own drama transpires? In many respects, what is left unsaid or swept under the proverbial rug is more toxic than what is. I mentioned The Minch earlier, which has a reputation for being unpredictable to the point of treachery. In Harris legends, The Minch is the home of malevolent kelpies, shape-shifting spirits who lure fishermen to their doom. John of John often portends such dangers, but we have to wait to see how the various crossings wash ashore.

 

Rob Weir

Selena Fails to Capture Her Spark

 SELENA (1997)

Written and directed by Gregory Nava

Warner Brothers, 127 minutes, PG

★★

 

Thirty-one years after her murder, Selena Quintanilla Pérez remains the most popular Tejano singer of all-time. The Hollywood movie Selena is a recounting of her life–just not a very good one.

 Let me state from the outset my non-familiarity with arena-style Tejano music. I’m also fuzzy on how Tejano music differs from Norteña/o music other than the first is Tex-Mex and the other Mex-Tex. I know more about acoustic musicians like Tish Hinjosa (one of the nicest people on the planet), Carrie Rodriguez, Eliza Gilkyson, and Nanci Griffith. I state truth, not cultural insensitivity, when I say that it’s all Border music to my ignorant ears. My idea of a Border superstar is Linda Ronstadt. Okay, so I’m wrong about that!

Selena sent me to YouTube where I grasped her appeal, but it doesn’t change the fact that the movie is as flat as Panhandle Texas. It’s as if Director Gregory Nava, who also wrote the script, assumed that audiences would fill in the cinematic holes with preexisting reverence. Many viewers no doubt did so–and the movie made money– but most of Selena is a standard music biopic with all that genre’s strengths (the music) and all its weaknesses. (When was the last time you saw one that did not delve into the pitfalls of celebrity?)   

 Selena takes us from Selena’s childhood to her murder on March 31, 1995. Adult Selena is played by Jennifer Lopez; her childhood self is represented by young actor Becky Lee. You could get the gist of Selena’s bio by skimming Wikipedia, but I’ll save you the trouble. She was born in Texas and died there just 23 years later. Stage mothers are infamous in the entertainment field, but, Marcella Quintanilla Pérez (Constance Marie) was too busy keeping her music-obsessed husband Abraham (Edward James Olmos) from bankrupting the family through his own dreams of stardom. Abe had a band called The Dinos, but it played American doo wop and pop rather than Tejano material favored by Latinos in Gulf Coast Texas. Selena loved to sing even as a child and her precocious talent plowed a different road to fame, a family band with Selena as the frontwoman of a flashy, high-energy Tejano repertoire. The film opens with Selena thrilling a sold-out concert at the Houston Astrodome. 

 Then we back up in time to observe how the band Selena y Los Dinos came together. It consisted of Selena, her sister Suzette (Jackie Guerra), brother A.B. (Jabob Vargas), dad, and sometimes mom. Selena was the star, but her greatest skill was manipulating Abraham into dumping doo wop, moving to Corpus Christi, taking long bus tours to build audiences, hiring former heavy metal guitarist Chris Pérez (Jon Seda) to play blistering leads, allowing her to follow her own fashion muses (including wearing a bustier on stage), and blessing her elopement to Chris. Selena sang her family into fortune and became a Grammy Award-winning Tejano superstar. Selena even had her own boutique, salon, and merchandise stores that indirectly led to her death. A friend and superfan, Yolanda Saldívar (Lupe Ontiveros), was hired to keep track of merch and keep the books, but rancor ensued when it became obvious that Yolanda had been dipping her fingers deep into the family till. Her firing led to a meeting that ended with Yolanda fatally shooting Selena. (Yolanda is serving life with the possibility of parole.)

 It was a senseless killing, but we’ve seen this kind of biopic so many times that it’s nearly obligatory that the titular celebrity must die. To sustain what we already know will happen, more is needed. Lopez is perfectly fine as Selena, but the rest of the cast is too mannered and wholesome for its own good, including Olmos who is usually compelling. Selena’s family, even bullheaded Abraham, come off as a fluffier version of The Jackson Five. I couldn’t stop wondering who this script was for, Anglos or Mexican Americans; surely racism, language barriers (in Mexico), and Abraham's rigid Jehovah's Witness faith warranted more than a proverbial drive-by.  Aside from a stage set malfunction, Selena’s struggle to learn Spanish, and Yolanda’s rampage, there was very little grit to the film. Eleven years on the road and these and family feuds are all you’ve got? Bidi, bidi, bom(b) bom(b).

 Rob Weir

Fackham Hall a Hilarious Parody of Downton Abbey

FACKHAM HALL (2025)

Directed by Jim O’Hanlon

Bleeker Street, 97 minutes, R (language, crude humor, language, innuendo)

★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Assuming you’re not one of those Downton Abbey fans that is so enamored that you can brook no criticism of it, Fackham Hall is a must-see satire. It’s a silly venture into lowbrow humor that’s akin to watching an old Henny Youngman performance, meaning that you will laugh yourself stupid despite thinking you shouldn’t. Think Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs crossed with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Airplane and you’re on the right track. You’d not be wrong to assume a backhand slap at Julian Fellowes, the aristocracy-loving British writer who reminds me of Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” sketch. I’ve not laughed so hard at a comedy film in years.

 

We meet young pickpocket Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe)–read “no one”–plying his craft on a London Street before ducking into his Catholic orphanage. A nun hands him a letter and offers him money to deliver it to Fackham Hall. After conning her into giving him a full British pound, he bicycles on his way before being smashed into by a car driven by Rose Fackham (Thomasin McKenzie). Watch how he parks his broken bike. I should mention that you should pay attention to everything in this film: things in the background, posters on the wall, road signs…. Even the video box bears the slogan, “Born to Aristocracy. Bred for Idiocy.” The gates to Fackham Hall proclaim incestus ad infinitum. One might suppose the Davenport family patriarch Lord Humphrey Davenport (Damian Lewis) is the dimmest bulb in the socket, but that would be shortsighted. He and his wife Lady Prudence (Katherine Waterson) are obsessed with marrying eldest daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) to a cousin who’s not too closely related as to invalidate the marriage. That’s because their three sons were lost in World War I, as we find out from hilarious scrapbook clippings. Also lost was Cousin Nathaniel “who was just a boy” when he too was lost. (We see him as a child in the trenches banging grenades together!) His mother Rose (Hayley Mills!), who narrates the film has spent the years since the war as a sourpuss crank.

 

There is, naturally, house staff. The butler Cyril (Jim McMullen) is a stiff who is a spot-on sendup of Downton’s Mr. Carter, and Mrs. Edna McAllister (Anne Maxwell) sort of channels Mrs. Hughes—if she had been vaccinated with a meanness serum. The vicar (Jimmy Carr) called upon to marry Poppy to the only eligible Davenport nitwit available, Cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), comes close to stealing the comedy script and running away with it via his act of saying aloud what’s in his subconscious before correcting himself by looking at the actual words from the wedding ritual! And what’s a wedding without loads of toff guests? There is Darvish Khalid (Ramon Tikaram) who acquired a limp during the war, but not for the reasons you would think; J. R. R. Tolkien (Jason Done), who has been working on The Hobbit for many years, has learned to speak Orc, and invites everyone to call him, “J.R.R. Tolkien, the Writer;” Bill Bobaggins, who is in love with his donkey, and whose name is among the many things Tolkien appropriates; plus, more people surnamed Davenport than one can imagine. As Poppy and Archie are about to be married, Poppy runs from the church and into the arms of the man she truly loves, a cut straight out of The Graduate. He’s a (night-)soiled bum who operates the local dung wagon. (As we find out later, Archie’s one of 22 times Poppy goes to the altar without getting married!) Poppy was probably right about Archie, though; he makes Lord Humphrey look like Einstein. But Lady Davenport–think Cora Crawley– is desperate to keep Fackham Hall in the family and begins to browbeat younger daughter Rose to marry Archie. In keeping with the Downton parody, Rose is deeply in love with Eric, who plays a Tom Branson/Artful Dodger mashup.

 

Things become a sticky wicket when Lord Humphrey is indeed killed–Archie almost did so in the obligatory “hunting” scene–and Inspector Watt appears to solve the crime and provide fodder for an Abbott and Costello routine. Will all eventually be tea and cakes among the twits? This is one of my favorite five-star terrible movies!

 

Rob Weir

The Snowman a Chilling Novel to Read as Winter Lurks

 

 

 

 

 

THE SNOWMAN (2007)

By Jo Nesbø

Knopf, 512 pages

★★★★

 

  

 

 

Get ready for it, faithful blog readers. I’ve been at the League of Women Voters annual used book sale and came back with a large bag filled with novels of favorite authrors and books I wanted to read years ago but was too busy to get to them. Older books are still good books!

 

I have read several Harry Hole mysteries from Norwegian author Jo(n) Nesbø. Hole might put you in mind of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch in the sense that both work on “cold cases,” serious crimes that were never solved. Both are prone to drinking too much, don’t suffer fools gladly, and have been unlucky in love. Harry Hole is also suspected of being out-of-touch with modern police methods and impossible to manage, hence he’s on everyone’s potential firing list whenever police screwup and the need arises to feed the media or public officials a scapegoat. Hole’s ace in the hole–so to speak–is that he is the only investigator in Norwegian history to have solved a serial killer case. (Being Norway, not the USA, that’s a short list!)

 

Several things rock Harry’s world. First, Katrine Bratt transfers into his cold case group in Oslo. She’s bright, beautiful, and from Bergen, which likes to forget that Oslo is the capital. Bratt exudes an inapproachable iciness and a whiff of (perhaps dangerous) ambition. She’s allegedly married, but seems to be coming on to Harry. Second, Harry’s ex-wife Rakel Fauke whose son Oleg looks upon Harry as a fatherly role model though biologically, he’s from a Russian dalliance before Harry or her current husband. Harry’s heavy drinking is partially linked to Rakel, the great love of Harry’s life who got away. She’s been cheating on husband # 2–with Harry–though she claims she only wants his sexual prowess. (They are Scandinavians, so what can I tell you?) Third, Harry’s drinking makes him seem even more of a dinosaur, something that young homicide cop Magnus Skarre occasionally spills in discussions with Harry’s boss Gunnar Hager. Harry’s always a step or two ahead of them, but he knows his head is on the chopping block.

 

Speaking of which, the first snow of the year leads Harry and Katrine into a missing persons case. Strange noises outside lead Birte Becker to investigate. Her husband is at a meeting, Birte tells her son Jonas to stay inside, and that’s the last she is seen. Did she run away? Unlikely as her pink scarf suddenly appears on the snowman they built and her cellphone is missing. When the ring leads Harry to the snowman, something more ominous is clearly afoot. If there is any doubt, Sylvia Ottersen, the mother of twins, also disappears. Police scouring the woods behind her barn make a gruesome discovery: Sylvia’s severed head upon a snowman’s body. Harry suspects a serial killer and Katrine unearths a pattern of disappearances of women with children 24 years into the past, always at the first snowfall.

 

Don’t be put off by the heft of The Snowman; it’s a twisty mystery with more suspects than a campout of patrons waiting for the mall to open on Black Friday. Several doctors are on Harry’s list, as is a missing Bergen cop, an obnoxious TV host who runs a prostitution ring, and Katrine. Questions abound. Why kill mothers? Why are doctors quiet about their research into rare medical conditions? Why haven’t crime scene forensics found more blood? What’s the significance of the killer’s MO (modus operandi)?

 

I found this novel both gripping and creepy. Perhaps it could have benefitted from judicious editing, as its pattern of “fingering” the wrong person as the Snowman wrong wears thin. Red herrings are standard in mysteries, and there’s always the possibility that the translation into English is to blame, but the quarter of the novel is, at once, thrilling and ragged. It sometimes seems that Nesbø stitched unused ideas into this novel. Two nearly fatal standoffs add tension, but steer The Snowman into adventure-story territory. It might not be a perfect mystery, but you will go through it like loose snow. It’s also far superior to the film made in 2017, which is hard to find, so warm up the cider and hunker down.

 

Rob Weir