Alvah’s Books

Gemma
By Meg Tilly
St. Martins Griffin
210 pages
$13.99

After quitting acting some years ago, Meg Tilly (Agnes of God, The Big Chill) turned to writing novels. Tilly who was a very good actress proves to be an even better writer, but let’s first get the unpleasantness out of the way: Gemma is disturbing; Tilly doesn’t pull any punches with any of the details, but that’s what makes Gemma such a gripping story.

Told from Gemma’s point of view, readers first meet the 12 year-old while she is still at school, telling us that  Buddy, her mother’s boyfriend, has arrived to pick her up. She’s surprised and says that it’s out of context for him to be there. From there we learn that Gemma enjoys going to school and studying. She likes learning new vocabulary and using the words. Although she has a bit of an edge to her, Gemma is a charming little girl.

However like most tweeners who like to talk, Gemma has a tendency to say too much; the reader discovers early on that Buddy has been molesting her since she was eight years old, telling her that if she says anything she will be going to jail. So Gemma has kept quiet, wondering if her mother even suspects of these nightly visits. Now Buddy feels that he can make an easy $100 and sells her for the afternoon to his friend Hazen Wood, who becomes obsessed with the girl.

A few days later, Wood kidnaps Gemma, throws her in the trunk of the car and embarks on cross-country trip a la Lolita. But Hazen is by no means the sophisticated and non-violent Humbert Humbert. Wood is a monstrous beast. He repeatedly rapes and beats Gemma, yet deludes himself to think that Gemma will eventually love him.

Tilly skillfully switches narratives often. From Gemma’s point of view, we read how she copes through “Gemma Travel,” imagining safe beautiful places where she’s far from the reaches of men like Buddy and Hazen, while Wood’s thoughts are twisted dreams of a child bride and family (Tilly includes a chilling passage that harks back to Lolita about fantasies of incest).

By the time Hazen and Gemma reach Chicago, the nightmare ends for the girl. Wood is taken into custody and Gemma goes to live with a sympathetic foster mother who was also sexually abused as a child. Tilly ends Gemma on cliff-hanger with Wood going to tria,l and Gemma telling her story to the jury.

Some readers will probably want more psychological drama, angst, and backstory, but there is no doubt that Gemma will leave readers raw, angry, and even dazed. Tilly’s characters jump from the pages in a realistically and frightening manner that overly sensitive readers might find the first half the book difficult reading, but given that 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 boys are sexually abused (U.S.Department of Justice Statistics, 2002) it’s a story that needs to be told often and read by many. Kudos to Tilly for writing such a heartbreaking book.

Commercial Break
By Keith Harmeyer
Hollywood2Hollywood Enterprises 2009
301 pages
$11.99

Reviewed by Randall Radic 

There’s a guy named Keith Harmeyer, who lives in New York. He used to be in advertising. Keith decided to write a book. Taking the old adage “write about what you know” to heart, Keith wrote a novel called Commercial Break. And what a novel it is!

Commercial Break is a combination of Carl Hiaasen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller. Which means it’s laugh-out-loud funny, replete with cynicism and verbal pyrotechnics. It’s the story of Adam Glassman, who, along with his partner, Carlo Fiore, runs a successful New York advertising agency that goes by the fitting name of Hot Posse. Adam’s marriage is on the rocks and he flamed out a long time ago. He’s sick and tired of overcompensating in his life. He feels like a fraud.

Adam’s looking for a way out of his miserable life. Utilizing the incredible virtuosity of his creative and organizational genius, he devises a plan that will provide him with enough money so he can retire forever. The plan has two tiny, little, teeny-weeny drawbacks. Mere hiccups, really: he can’t do it alone, and it means breaking the law.

The plan involves selling the same Super Bowl commercial to six of his clients. One commercial, six fees. The risk is significant, but the payoff is enormous. Adam recruits his partner, Carlo Fiore, who feels that the undertaking by definition entails a certain diminution of dignity. Rather than make a moral choice, Carlo decides to resolve his dilemma by placing it in the hands of a woman. This will relieve him of the tedium. By the way, Carlo’s luck with the fairer sex is not anything to write home about. He has a girlfriend who is the prototype of the new woman – she’s a pangynic nightmare. In short, she lacks that provocative warmth which draws man to woman.

Meanwhile, Adam has his own female problems. He gets romantically involved with a young woman – an employee – who is not only a dire and frightening female, but sucks down wine by the gallon.

One of the funniest parts of the book is the commercial that Adam is peddling to all and sundry. Composed of “six, magnificent blondes in patent leather bikinis sitting on a black iceberg,” with Bobby Darin singing ‘Mack the Knife’ in the background, the commercial is a gelatinous mass of rhodomontade and piffle, which just adds to the insane humor, because it’s so indicative of contemporary marketing and advertising.

It’s one of those things that has to be read to be believed. And Keith Harmeyer pulls it off without a hitch. This guy can write comedy. In fact, Commercial Break should be a movie. It’s got all he necessary ingredients for a blockbuster.

The reviewer refuses to spoil the book by revealing what happens along the way, as the “big idea” is implemented. Needless to say the author mixes in poetic paradoxes, bracketing oxymorons, morons, and a few tawdry magician’s tricks as he demonstrates how, in the final analysis, the masses are the final tyrants in today’s advertising world. Which means this novel can be read at a number of different levels. On one level, there’s an amusing story of white-collar crime. On another level there is a social commentary that points out how the hoi polloi seem to confuse standard of living with quality of life, and equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity. And how the scorn of the intellectual elite blinds it to the vast primitive power of mediocrity.

Commercial Break is the funniest and most entertaining book the reviewer has read in years. Readers will not be disappointed.

A World I Never Made
By James LePore
The Story Plant
272 pages
$24.95

In A World I Never Made, the debut novel by James LePore, readers will read about lost and newfound love, betrayal among colleagues and lovers, terror, and thrilling fast-paced action and edge-of-your-seat suspense.

The story opens with Pat Nolan in a Parisian police station, reading his daughter Megan’s suicide note. He has come from the United Stated to identify and claim her body.  However, the corpse at the morgue—that of a young woman with advanced ovarian cancer—is not his daughter.

Nolan recognizes immediately that Megan has set up this faux suicide because she is in danger, and it is up to him to find and help her. His task is complicated when he is attacked by two Middle-Eastern men, but lucky for Nolan he is saved by Catherine Laurence, a French detective who has been assigned to trail him.

Laurence and her superiors discover that the body in the morgue is not Megan’s and that she is suspected of working with a group of terrorists who bombed several locations in Casablanca. The hope is that Nolan will lead them to Megan and the terrorists and prevent a potential 9/11 scenario in France. However, it’s not all that simple when Catherine realizes that something is awry and goes on leave to help Nolan find Megan.

The story is juxtaposed with Megan’s own story that takes place almost a year earlier and how she disappeared via her fake suicide. A college drop-out, who decided to acquire her education by living in Europe and in the beds of wealthy men, Megan Nolan is a journalist who primarily writes for women magazines, but a sudden intellectual interest in terrorism develops, and she travels to Morocco to do some research. There she meets Abdel Lahani, a Saudi businessman, and becomes his mistress. A few months later and pregnant with Lahani’s child, she discovers that her lover is more than a businessman, but a terrorist with grand plans to attack European countries.

Meanwhile, Nolan’s and Catherine’s quest to find his daughter has them following Megan’s leads, which ultimately leads them to a group of Roma– an intriguing element that convincingly moves the story forward–in Paris and later to the Czech Republic. However, these are the same leads that the terrorists follow with the hope of finding Megan and killing her.

LePore keeps the fast pace of the story by switching back and forth between the search for Megan and with her life in Morocco with Lahani. Readers learn through the back stories in each of the sections of the strained relationship between father and daughter. LePore balances this estrangement by having Nolan and Catherine fall in love, but this love affair surfaces too quickly in the story and slows down the pace.

LePore’s strength lies in his descriptive detail, which mostly likely can be attributed to his skill (according to his bio) as a photographer in which he captures the image he has seen through the viewfinder and composes scenes that show the reader the actions and locales in Paris and Morocco.

However, LePore seems to lose his way when it comes to characterization. Of all the players, Megan is the only one who is fully fleshed out, and it seems the one character that the author has spent the most time developing and analyzing. LePore provides a solid foundation of Megan’s psyche and brings to life a manipulative woman who has contempt for her father and men in general.

Unfortunately, JePore fails to bring any of these strong personality traits to both Catherine and Nolan. Readers never get an adequate explanation of why Catherine hated—a strong emotion in itself–her husband so much. LePore offers a stock explanation, but the reaon isn’t sufficient and doesn’t add much to the story. Like Catherine, Nolan comes across as somewhat insipid. He is meant to be sympathetic–a strong and silent type—a man who experienced the tragedy of losing his wife in childbirth and who is left alone to take care of his daughter, but readers with an interest in the father/daughter dynamics will want to know more of the wedge that drove Megan and Nolan so wide apart.

In spite of  its few flaws, as a fast-moving suspense story with various twists and turns, A World I Never Made succeeds in keeping readers interested until its satisfying and realistic conclusion.