The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton, by Michael Collins

[Seiichi]

From the front flap:

It's been over a decade since E. Robert Pendleton published his brilliant short-story debut, and his hopes for a dazzling literary career have faded. Barely hanging on to his tenure in literature at Bannockburn College, Pendleton feels his simmering despair boil over with the arrival on campus of his one-time friend, now nemesis, the bestselling author and king of the coffee-table book, Allen Horowitz.

 

For Pendleton, death seems to be the only remaining option, but his suicide attempt fails, halted at the last moment by the intervention of Adi Wiltshire, a graduate student battling her own demons of failure and thwarted ambition. During Pendleton's long convalescence, Adi discovers a novel hidden in his basement: a brilliant, quasi-autobiographical story with a gruesome child-murder at its core.

 

The publication of Scream causes a storm of publicity: a whirlwind into which Adi, Horowitz and the still-incapacitated Pendleton are thrust. The novel is treated as an existential masterpiece and looks set to bring its author the success he's always sought --- when, ironically, he is no longer in a condition to appreciate it --- until questions begin to be asked about its content: in particular about the uncanny resemblance between Pendleton's fictional crime and a real-life, unsolved local murder . . .

My thoughts:

 

I've placed this under crime/mystery fiction although this book belongs just as much to the literary fiction category and should perhaps be approached with that in mind.

 

As a crime/mystery novel, there's no suspense to justify reading past the first half of the book, when the cold case investigation actually gains some kind of momentum. By that point, the reader should have a strong suspicion of what's to come. The journey from suspicion to truth can be painfully tedious as we follow Ryder, the investigator, conduct his interviews. The book eventually splits into two threads: one following the murder investigation, the other the relationship between Adi and Horowitz as they deal with the uncertainty of Scream's success and the media interest in the real-life murder mystery.

 

For Adi, her involvement with Pendleton takes its toll. Her final chance at a thesis depends on the literary success of Scream and the subsequent revival of Pendleton's literary reputation, but at the same time she's convinced Pendleton's guilty of murder, a thought shared by Horowitz whom she asks to champion the novel. Horowitz's reputation is at stake, but whereas it's possible to sympathise with Adi's predicament, it's hard to take a liking to Horowitz, someone steeped in intellectual facetiousness. Casting aside the fact that Horowitz had "sold out" and gone on to enjoy great literary success, it's easy to see why Pendleton would dislike him so much.

 

Similarly, it's difficult to like Ryder. Given that we have to follow his investigations, reading through his passages can be a chore. Had he taken his own advice on conducting investigations, he could have saved everyone a lot of time. Beset by his own problems, he's psychologically unfit to conduct an investigation, his only redeeming feature being that his investigation does come to an end. Secrets are uncovered --- that's more or less obligatory in any crime novel. However, it's difficult to see how Ryder could have been so successful in the past given how haphazard his method is. By the end of the book, readers could be forgiven for thinking whether they had to endure through Ryder's investigation and whether it could have been conducted in the background, leaving the focus of the novel solely on Adi and Horowitz and the repercussions of their actions. Then again, that would have made for a much shorter novel.