Insatiable bookworm that I am, forever burrowing, reading this and that in places hither and yon, I’ve been known to go slumming on occasion with a trashy pulp thriller. I would never want to make a steady diet of the things, but as a break from my usual literary fare—typically a mix of history, music, essays, and quality fiction—a potboiler featuring a winsome he-male who saves the world from some dire horror provides a lovely refreshment along the lines of a cozy cup of Golden Kenya TGFOP.
However, of late the savor has gone stale, even soured into distaste. I’m not altogether sure when I might have begun crossing this particular Rubicon, but I can pinpoint the moment when I knew I had landed on the far shore. A while back I loaded up my Kindle with a bevy of thrillers from a particular bestselling author I’ve enjoyed for decades. This fellow writes high-speed escapist fare, mostly centering around a fictional government-funded ocean-exploring organization and its band of brothers who save the day, get the girl, and make everything shipshape.
I sought nothing more than a few hours’ entertainment. Instead, I plunged into snarling, full-tilt aversion mode. This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly, quipped Dorothy Parker, it should be thrown with great force. I was tempted: oh, it would have made a great gesture, but Kindle DXes don’t come cheap. I decided to save the theatrics for another day.
From my first encounter with this novelist’s output I’ve recognized that he writes by formula. Invariably a novel opens with an incident in the past—maybe just a few decades ago, maybe in ancient times—in which some object is lost, some person is killed, or whatnot. It may be historical (the destruction of the Alexandrian library) or imaginary (some ritzy doodad from a tomb somewhere), but by the end of the Prologue it Has Been Lost. As Alfred Hitchcock would say, this is the McGuffin.
Chapter One opens in the present day and typically introduces the Band of Brothers. However, we may be presented with a batch of villains first, and then the Band of Brothers. In particular, the Prime Stud will rescue somebody, probably a hot damsel of the Demi Moore rather than Fay Wray type—i.e., a do-er rather than a scream-er. Attraction will blossom, naturellement, although the inevitable coitus will be postponed for downright Vatican durations. With that we’re off and running to wherever, doing whatever, driving whatever, flying whatever, shooting whomever, screwing whomever. No matter what the mix, the following is guaranteed:
- Prime Stud will perform prime stud service on the hot damsel.
- The McGuffin will be found and restored to its proper place and/or function.
- Vehicles—airborne, aquatic, terrestrial, or subterranean—will play a vital part.
- Any number of those vehicles will be utterly trashed.
- Folks will extricate themselves from, or be rescued from, numerous improbable predicaments.
- No thought will be given to the public purse, as apparently not one person in the Government of the United States has ever demanded why the fuck are the taxpayers throwing all this money at a gang of delayed-adolescence boytoys with a mania for destroying expensive hardware?
Just as Anna Russell provided a delectable recipe for cooking up your own private Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, one could concoct any number of these potboilers, provided one can research/copy/invent enough hot-ass techno-whiz horseshit and come up with a suitable series of cliffhangers. Start by figuring out what the McGuffin does: say, the Rosetta Stone originally carried a coded message that, once interpreted, will provide mankind with the secret to cold fusion. Then write your Prologue: reconstruct the excavation of the Rosetta Stone, but change things so your (historical) discoverer chips off the section containing the super-duper message and deposits same into his camel-duffelbag for safekeeping. Send him off across the desert to the telegraph station in Aqaba, and knock him off along the way by sinking him in desert sand à la “Lawrence of Arabia.” Sayonara, McGuffin.
Chapter Two. It’s the present and, oh let’s see here: mysterious blasts of sub-oceanic energy have been emanating from the Hebrides. The surges are befouling plankton reproduction, threatening collapse of the oceanic ecosystem resulting in global catastrophe. That gets the Band of Brothers into the act. Separately send mysterious-energy-blast scientist Demi Moore to the Hebrides; some scoundrel attacks her while she’s performing underwater scientific-y measurements with that super-duper secret Syntectonic Magnoresonant Wave Oscillator that only 2.78 people in the whole world know how to use. Prime Stud to the rescue: Sayonara, scoundrel.
Chapter Three, and take it from there: the blasts are the foul work of dastardly assholes who seek global domination via cold fusion and don’t care how much plankton they traumatize in the process. Now roam the planet, put the Band in rare cars and antique planes and jazzy tanks and ultra-secret fancy-schmanzy submersibles. Given ’em guns and grenade launchers and lasers and Chrono-Syncratic Global Positioning Infinitestimal Communicators. Stick ’em in a leaky sub at the bottom of an ocean trench, suspend them from the edge of the Mauna Loa caldera with redhot lava going glurp blurp blorp sizzzzzzzzzzzzzzz right under their feet. Shoot ’em, shoot ’em, and shoot ’em some more, but if you’re the bad guys, miss the people and shred the vehicles. At some point the baddies are allowed a shot or two that wings Prime Stud, or a member of the Band might suffer from snakebite, frostbite, heatstroke, sunstroke, broken bones, cuts & bruises, or prickly heat. Even Demi Moore may be in for a moment or two of couture malfunction, but not, nota bene, in the film adaptation.
All this may well explain my decision to resign from potboiler-readerdom. I’ve just had it with the damn things. The latest camel’s-back-breaking instance opened with an already predictable script and went on to wallow in pedestrian tiresomeness. The author, having milked the original Band of Brothers dry, has invented a New Band of Brothers who are, not surprisingly, more or less identical to the old ones. The reincarnated Prime Stud II possesses a gazillion dollars worth of airplanes instead of antique cars, for instance, and the Stalwart Aggressively Heterosexual Sidekick is Eastern European rather than Hispanic. A penchant for introducing new situations and new characters with each chapter has mushroomed out of control; I noticed that as late as Chapter 11 new folks were still being thrown at me, setup after setup, continent after continent, villain after villain, snappy vehicle after snappy vehicle. And then…lord love a duck, the padding, oh the padding: After the obligatory villain swipes the McGuffin, he causes a sub-glacial cave-in, requiring Prime Stud to come up with a daring, technologically-enhanced rescue of Demi Moore + Company. But all the villainous S.O.B. had to do, plotwise, was steal the McGuffin. Everybody could have just walked out from under the glacier, or been wafted to Valhalla, for all it mattered to the story.
I started skimming. There really wasn’t much of anything there worth attending to. In this case the McGuffin was a doohickey—lost via fighter pilot crash in the Alps during World War I—that would prevent Armageddon by Primeval Mold. You’ll never guess what happened: they recovered the McGuffin, thereby preventing Armageddon by Primeval Mold! How reassuring that life on Earth will not devolve back into the pond slime that was its origin. At least not today, thanks to Demi Moore, Prime Stud II, and the New Band of Brothers. All ends happily with Prime Stud II acquiring yet another rare airplane, after which he sticks it cheerfully to Demi Moore while Stalwart Sidekick sticks it cheerfully to some unidentified but receptive lady somewhere.
And as for me? Thank you, Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion, Gene H. Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, Richard J. Evans, and others who are providing me with reading that requires my attention and repays my efforts. As for the pulpy potboilers, well…they served me well in their day, but I guess I’m just too old or too stodgy or too discerning or too jaded. Time to drop them off at that St. Vincent de Paul of adult life’s discards, to join company with yesterday’s model cars, Tom Swift books, skateboards, all-nighters, TV sitcoms, dorm keggers, and Khachaturian.