Insomniac holds vigil with Keynes
If you’ve ever spent a sleepless night worrying about your career, your family and the gross inequality of American life, then chances are you will love, or at least relate to, “The Guest Lecture” by Martin Riker. Riker has written a quirky second novel of breathtaking genius.
The story unfolds over a long night in a dark hotel room as a young feminist economist who has recently been denied tenure lies awake beside her sleeping husband and daughter and frets about a talk she is woefully unprepared to give the next day.
Abby decides to practice by using a memorization technique sometimes called a “memory palace.” She assigns parts of the lecture to different rooms in her house so that later she can “walk” through those spaces in her mind and remember the talk.
To keep her company, she summons the spirit of English economist John Maynard Keynes, whose essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” has served as a lodestar for her academic career. What first attracted her to Keynes was his “pragmatic optimism,” centered on the belief that governments could and should play a benevolent role in citizens’ lives.
The problem is that having lost her job, she is not feeling particularly optimistic, especially since as the primary breadwinner, she is now at risk of losing the house she is exploring with Keynes.
Riker doesn’t stick faithfully to this bizarre but charming conceit. As Abby and Keynes move from living room to dining room, then upstairs, she is not so much practicing her speech as she is recalling her entire life, or at least the formative moments that shaped her into the highly anxious, exceedingly ethical, fantastically interesting person she is today.
Toward the end of the book, she recalls similar insomniac nights in graduate school when she would turn on the light and read Keynes. “His voice, his astuteness and humor, his crabbiness, the life in his voice, his way of seeing and thinking about the world” — all that made her love Keynes. Those same qualities, but in Abby, will make readers love her. — Ann Levin, Associated Press
Like the “fusions” that terrify the main
characters, Dean Koontz’s thriller “The House at the End of the World” feels not quite fully formed. It starts as a mystery — what sort of dangerous experiments is the U.S. government conducting on an island called Ringrock? — and ends as a buddy story, with a woman and a teenager on the run, paranoid that they are being hunted for what they know about Ringrock.
Katie, an artist, “lives less for herself than for the dead” on an island. We get her back story in brief chapters, and she has every reason to be suspicious of the government. On a neighboring island lives 14-year-old Libby, whose mom and dad work as scientists on Ringrock and treat her more like a boarder than a daughter. When explosions are heard coming from Ringrock and mysterious agents show up looking for someone, or something, Katie and Libby must join forces to survive.
Eventually we get explanations for the events on Ringrock, in the form of Libby’s father’s scientific journal, but since the novel never takes us there, it all feels even more detached and supernatural than it is. The horror unleashed is never fully engaged by the characters, and it’s more often heard. We never get that moment when humans confront what is hunting them. Instead, the back half of the book focuses on Katie and Libby fleeing the islands and figuring out how to create a new future together.
In his defense, Koontz obviously chose to tell his tale in this manner. He’s more interested in how Katie and Libby navigate a world in which nobody can be trusted and they never feel safe.
Koontz completists will no doubt add this to their collection, but thriller fans either looking for a good scare or a satisfying tale of triumph over evil should look elsewhere.