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Shock Therapy
A Review by Chris Bolton

The other night I caught an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in which a fourteen-year-old girl accuses her ex-boyfriend, an eighteen-year-old with a penis piercing, of tying her down and raping her. Ultimately the true story unravels: the girl's father is a controlling narcissist who likes to watch his wife have sex with strangers and, since he became infertile, has encouraged her to bear the strangers' children as well. Now that she's had a hysterectomy, the father needs a new vessel to bring children into their family -- so he tied his daughter down and inseminated her with the semen of the last two men who had sex with her mother.

This played on basic cable at 8:00 on a weeknight.

I mention this because a lot of critics have gone to great lengths to describe Gillian Flynn's novel, Sharp Objects, as "shocking" and "graphic," and I have to wonder what rock they've been hiding under -- or rather, what tea cozy mysteries they've been reading.

Shock value is a purely subjective thing, of course; one reader's utter revulsion is another's minor shrug. And reading is necessarily more subjective than television; we both see the same graphic image when we're watching a TV show (although, in the above case, they couldn't actually show any of that happening), but in reading about a scene of violence or sexuality we might envision two completely different things.

Still, the most shocking element of Flynn's debut novel, to me, was that anyone was actually shocked.

I can excuse most of the book critics and lit-bloggers -- perhaps they aren't avid fans of L&O:SVU like me -- but as the lead TV critic for Entertainment Weekly, Flynn should have known better. And when Stephen King blurbs on the book's cover, "I found myself dreading the last thirty pages or so but was helpless to stop turning them," I wonder if I've somehow read the wrong book.

Sharp Objects is a decent mystery with some nice elements. The story moves along at a swift clip and the protagonist becomes more interesting as the novel progresses. The murders are "admirably nasty," to quote King, and so are the townsfolk, whose secrets and transgressions are enough to coin the long-overdue term "Midwestern Gothic."

But "a terrific debut novel"? (King claims even that description is "really too mild.") The praise seems more than excessive to me.

I'm reminded of another recent first novel (that shall go unnamed) which has gotten a lot of press, glowing reviews, absolutely fawning acclaim from a number of writers I greatly admire, and has even poked its head onto bestseller lists. I closed the book about halfway through, finding its horror elements unable to provoke so much as a shudder, its protagonist crushingly dull, and the plot twist at its middle to be so ludicrous I started laughing (the sort of thing that would make a great Jack Black comedy).

There's no such thing as an absolute opinion, of course -- some of my favorite books have been loathed by people to whom I recommended them -- but more and more I'm shaking my head in puzzlement at the acclaim some books are receiving.

n Sharp Objects, Camille Preaker, a cub reporter for a barely-read Chicago newspaper, is dispatched to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, to write about a crime spree: one preteen girl was murdered and another has gone missing. Within days of Camille's arrival the second girl turns up dead. Both have had their teeth removed postmortem.

The killings aren't the grisliest part of the book. That honor is reserved for Camille's family, which consists of a mother who is overly possessive of her younger child and completely cold toward Camille, a stepfather who barely seems to exist, and Camille's thirteen-year-old half-sister, who could have her own episode of Oprah designed to terrify parents as to what their kids are doing in all those late-night parties with older boys.

Camille herself is a bit of a head case, having utilized an adolescent obsession with the ever-popular affliction of "cutting" to turn her body into a walking dictionary of verbal scars. Only one space on her body remains unblemished -- the middle of her back. Guess what part of her gets blemished by the end of the book.

I won't spoil any of the plot -- and please refrain from throwing your copies of The Mystery Writer's Handbook of Secret Tricks at me -- but for the uninitiated, or those who find themselves constantly fooled, here's how you solve nine out of ten mysteries: the least likely character to have committed the murder is the one who committed the murder. Furthermore, pinpoint a major character who probably isn't even a suspect, and who seems to have no reason for getting so much attention, and you've got your killer.

Keeping that in mind, the murderer in Sharp Objects was painfully obvious from very early on. So was a dark revelation about one major character -- and when Camille says, "God, I'm so angry....That it took this long for me to figure it out," I admit, I felt the same way about her.

It doesn't help that the culprit's ultimate revelation comes so quickly, in such a hurried manner, that it feels like an afterthought, something Flynn jotted on a napkin and FedExed to her editor five minutes before the book went to press. What should have been the climax of the novel, the scene that slams into us like a sledgehammer to the kneecap, instead feels like a light tap from a child's plastic mallet.

What makes up for these deficiencies, and keeps the reader turning pages, is Flynn's storytelling panache. She utilizes a slim, wry, down-and-dirty prose style that revels in the deliciously ugly little details she's crammed into every corner of her tale:

My mother's massive house is at the southernmost point of Wind Gap, the wealthy section, if you can count approximately three square blocks of town as a section....It's full of cubbyholes and nooks, curiously circuitous. The Victorians...needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions. Extra space is always good.

Flynn also employs sharp psychological acuity, pegging her characters in quick sentences that feel precise and accurate:

My mother was wearing blue to the funeral. Black was hopeless and any other color was indecent. She also wore blue to Marian's funeral, and so did Marian. She was astonished I didn't remember this. I remembered Marian being buried in a pale pink dress. This was no surprise. My mother and I generally differ on all things concerning my dead sister.

Interest in Camille ratchets up some ways into the novel when her cutting habit is fully unveiled in all its glory. In fact, amidst a freak show of miscreants and flibbertigibbets, it's Camille who springs most fully to life, with her highly believable insecurities and status as a social recluse. Flynn avoids the all-too-common trap of turning her heroine into a goddess who has it all -- a Clarice Starling crimefighter with impeccable fashion sense and a dreamy-yet-sensitive boyfriend -- and, indeed, seems to have designed Camille to be the dreary animus of all those perky chick-lit protagonists.

Wallowing in the misery, dysfunction, backstabbing, casual sexual exploitation, and rampant pettiness of small-town life is the strongest part of the narrative. I wonder if Sharp Objects might have worked better as a pitch-black comedy, or as a thriller without the mystery trappings. Flynn seems to have invested so much energy in making her main character live and breathe, neuroses fully ablaze, that she neglected to craft a formidable mystery.

I enjoyed Sharp Objects despite its shortcomings. I suspect I might have enjoyed it more had it not arrived weighted down with hyperbole and excessive praise. Have we set the bar so low for books that a modestly entertaining novel can so easily be blown out of proportion? Or am I missing something that everyone else can see too clearly? This is a greater mystery than anything in Sharp Objects.