Steven Amidon,  2004

Ian Caldwell &
Dustin Thomason
2004

After many hours of teeth-gnashing and groaning, not to mention falling asleep after reading a couple of pages at a time, I finally finished The Rule of Four today. For a lazy reader such as myself, this book was just too much work. There were many times when I felt like I should toss it in the garbage, but there was something compelling about it, and I found myself struggling on because I had the feeling that it would eventually be worth the effort. It wasn’t.

The Rule of Four was written by two school buddies; Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason. I often hesitate to buy coauthored fiction because there usually seems to be one writer who is more talented than the other, and you can tell it in the writing. I think that was the case with this novel. Sometimes I’d read a section that was well written, and at other times the writing would fall flat. Maybe I kept reading in the hope that the better of the two young authors would finally take over altogether. It didn’t seem to happen, although the last third of the novel was smoother and more cohesive than anything that had come before, so maybe the more talented of the two wrote most of the climax and conclusion.

I’m not going to bash The Rule of Four completely, though, at least not until the next paragraph. The authors chose a very difficult subject to write about, and they ARE young, so I guess I’ll cut them a little slack. The story revolves around four Princeton roomates who experience some deadly adventures during their senior year. Paul, the most studious of the four, is writing his thesis on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an actual living, breathing five-hundred-year-old text. There are some older Hypnerotomachia scholars who want to steal his research because he has accomplished more in the several years he’s devoted to the book than they have in their entire lifetimes. The main plot centers on what happens to the roomates as they try to keep Paul’s research out of the clutches of these pitiful and frightening older men.

Okay, now it’s time for the bashing. The major theme of the novel is obsession. Paul, and to a lesser extent, his roomate Tom, are obsessed with the Hypnerotomachia, often to the detriment of every other aspect of their lives. Paul (who never really had a life before his research anyway, being a poor unfortunate orphan and all) eats and sleeps the Hypnerotomachia. Paul’s best friend, Tom, nearly destroys his relationship with his cookie-cutter girlfriend because of his own obsession with Paul’s research. All this obsessing paled in comparison to the true underlying obsessive current of the book: Princeton! A noticeable portion of the The Rule of Four was a paean to Princeton. I didn’t care about the “naked games”; I didn’t care about the eating clubs; I didn’t care about any of the Ivy League details, and, by the end, I didn’t care about what happened either. I wanted an exciting story with fully-developed characters and a plot that was easy to follow. None of these elements were well-developed. The relationships between characters were wooden and at times the plot was a total yawner.

One good thing has come out of writing this entry. I think I’ve figured out who is the more talented of the two authors. I’ll never tell, after all, there is a miniscule possibility that I may be mistaken. NOT!

 

After much contemplation, I have decided that my favorite ‘05 novel is this one.  In case you can’t read the title, it’s The Ha-Ha, and the author is Dave King.  This is Mr. King’s first novel, and he’s already brilliant.  Envy threatened to rear its ugly head while I was devouring this book.  If I could write this well, I’d quit my job and take up writing for a living, for sure!

I hardly ever buy books because I have the technology to interlibrary loan them, but I made an exception with this one and ordered it from Amazon to give to my father for Christmas.  He loved it, and that’s really saying something because he’s the pickiest reader I know.  The book’s hero is a disabled Vietnam veteran named Howard Kapostash.  His brain was damaged by a land mine in ‘Nam, and as a result of his injury, Howard is unable to speak.  Sylvia Mohr, his narcissistic ex-girlfriend, saddles him with Ryan, her 9 year old son, while she trots off to rehab to kick her cocaine habit.  The plot centers on how Howard and his roomates deal with having this kid in their lives, and how Howard deals with everything else as well.  There are so many layers to this novel: there’s the current story, there’s the backstory and there’s the story inside Howard’s mind.