A BIG BOOK WITH A STRONG FEELING: JOEL DICKER'S DISAPPEARANCE OF STEPHANIE MAILER

 

In 1994, a brutal quadruple-murder shook the seaside resort town of Orphea, in the tony Hamptons on Long Island. The body of a jogger was found in the road outside a house; inside the house the mayor, his wife and young son all lay dead. Two young state troopers cracked the case, and in a car chase drove the killer off a bridge into a river, where he died, a presumed suicide.

Twenty-five years later, one of the those troopers, Jesse Rosenberg, is about to retire. He's now a captain, known as Captain 100%, for his perfect record in solving cases. But his retirement reception gets crashed by journalist Stephanie Mailer, who tells Jesse that he is, in fact, Captain 99%. He did not solve the biggest case, the one that made his career, and enigmatically, she says he failed to see what was right in front of his eyes. She leaves and tells him she will see him later. But she doesn't. That night, she disappears.

The Swiss writer Joel Dicker's follow-up to The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair is, at first glance, a complex locked-room (or locked village) mystery, in which the stories of twenty years past are revisited and opened up to new examination. But in reality, it is a digging into character: a series of character sketches whose interaction centers on the crime, and whose changes come about as information is discovered and revealed. In a sense, this creates a story-telling dilemma, in terms of what information to release to the reader, and when to it. From the point of view of the classic locked-village mystery, this can be a fault, as sometimes that which is withheld would seem normal to have appeared much earlier by the process of natural selection.

But Dicker has avoided that trampling over the basic whodunit puzzle, with the aim of revealing more about the characters, through the nifty way the novel is structured, with multiple flashbacks and multiple points of view. These intertwine: Jesse's own very unusual upbringing, and his first love Natasha, for whom he pines, have their own impact on the tale, while the former police chief, Kirk Hayward who has moved out to Hollywood and written a play which supposedly will reveal the name of the true killer—a situation which does create more mystery but also makes one wonder about the sense of realistic policing (and indeed realistic murdering!) once the play becomes the focus of the town's theatre festival, the high point of its tourist season.

“I wanted to try something different,” Dicker said during his virtual UK book launch. “I wanted a challenge, to write a choral book with lots of characters and sub-plots. But this is Orphea—and Orpheus was, of course, all about not looking back, which is a great irony. Before Chief Hayward's play, the festival's production was going to be Uncle Vanya; despite Jesse and Natasha's backgrounds in Russian it's hard to see parallels between Vanya and the situation in Orphea except for one, perhaps: in Vanya happiness seems to be something that eludes us in this life. It's interesting that Dicker's characters all seem to be chasing some kinds of unachievable happiness, but in his ending Dicker plays further with that. His approach to the book echoes some of this: “it can work like a crime novel,” he said, “investigation becomes like a guide, a path you follow to the characters.”

Dicker said he chose the name Stephanie Mailer partly out of connection with Norman Mailer. “I create a character before I give the name,” he explained, and when I thinking of the town I wanted to have a lake called Deer Lake, which reminded me of Mailer's novel, The Deer Park. It was that simple. Or not quite, because in the translation, from the French, Deer Lake becomes Stag Lake, so the Mailer connection disappears!

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer is a big book, with a deep cast of characters and a plot woven through two decades. There are multiple twists before the end, but the real pleasure may come from the construction itself, like a play (perhaps Chekhov's The Wood Demon?) with a big cast, an expansive set, and a sea of revelations. Talking with Dicker, I mentioned my favourite Swiss writers, Jacques Chessex and Friedrich Durrenmatt, both of whom used the framework of the crime novel to investigate issues of both character and society. Both, however, worked primarily in shorter books. “Yes,” he said, “a book is what we see before we read; a big book may scare the reader but give a very good feeling to have finished. A short book is a strong feeling.” What Dicker has produced is a big book, but with a strong feeling.

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer by Joel Dicker

translated by Howard Curtis; MacLehose Press £20.00 ISBN9780857059208

this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

JACQUES CHESSEX'S A JEW MUST DIE

Like The Vampire Of Ropraz, Jacques Chessex's previous novel (see my review here) published in English translation by Bitter Lemon Press, A Jew Must Die is based on an historical crime, and like the first book it raised questions Swiss society did not necessarily want raised. But where Vampire was more concerned with the way society reacted to a crime, A Jew Must Die is more concerned first with the crime itself, the murder, in Payerne, of a Jewish cattle-merchant by Swiss Nazis, and by the lack of reaction from Swiss society to this crime. The beauty of the work, if beauty is the right word, is the way Chessex expands that lack of reaction into a wider indictment, an analysis using a Swiss microcosm of the awful phenomenon that was the Third Reich.

He does this in prose that is consciously bare, factual, its emotions controlled. Chessex grew up in the area where the murder took place; he was at school with the son of one of the killers, and there is something very Swiss about the cold rationality with which he presents his story. It is a tone which survives the translation by W. Donald Wilson, and since Wilson translated Vampire as well it is telling that he's able to convey Chessex's different voices so well.

There is also a fairy-tale, brothers Grimm feel to the story, particularly as the gang of ne'er do wells who make up the local Nazi party try to lure Arthur Bloch to his death on the pretext of buying a cow, one for which he appears to offer them a good deal. That they then butcher Bloch as they would an animal only heightens the monstrosity of the crime, but it is the relative lack of reaction from the locals which makes clear the parallel with the larger monstrosity that was the Holocaust, and the way the good burghers of Austria, Germany and more countries conspired with their silence and indifference to help it happen.

In the character of Fernand Ischi, the local gauleiter, Chessex both sets him apart and fits him into his community. Swiss authorities handed out severe sentences to the murderers, but the reaction of the locals was to ignore it, as if it had never happened. Yet when Chessex moves to the present, and himself, he discovers that in some ways nothing has changed in his small world.
Arthur Bloch's tombstone read Gott Weiss Warum. God Knows Why. Though in supernatural terms that may well be true, in this world, it is too pat a response. It is a telling and perfect amibiguity that lies at the heart, just beneath the perfect surface, of this novella.

Chessex died last October, my obituary was published in the Guardian two months later, you can link to that here, and to my IT posting here. The Last Skull Of M. DeSade, his last novel, is scheduled to appear from Bitter Lemon next year.

A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex Bitter Lemon Press, £6.99 ISBN 9781904738510

NOTE: This review also appears at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

JACQUES CHESSEX: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Jacques Chessex is in today's Guardian, you can link to it here. In a very moving piece of synchronicity, a copy of A Jew Must Die, which is published in February, arrived in the post this morning from the estimable Bitter Lemon Press, and moves to the top of my reading list. You can also read my September 2008 review of The Vampire Of Ropraz by linking here.

A couple of small points about the obit: L'Ogre was published in English as A Father's Love, but only in America, by Bobbs Merrill. It's an interesting title switch, because of the ironic ambiguity, but what is lost is the fairy-tale sense of a dangerous childhood. The Guardian added the French titles of books which basically have English cognates, like The Vampire Of Ropraz, which seemed redundant to me, but in the case of Les Aveugles du seul regard left the title as is, as I suggested they might, since my own translation as The Blind Who Only Glance may not be the best.

I had also mentioned a collaboration he did with the sculptor Manuel Muller, A Night In The Forest, which when I wrote the piece had yet to appear, but now presumably has been published. I'm hoping Bitter Lemon will publish The Last Skull Of M. De Sade in English eventually; in Donald Wilson's translations one gets the feeling of Chessex's French prose, a style which reminds me somewhat of the prose of poets like Robert Creeley, and with the atmospheric feeling of a number of Quebecois novelists, particularly Marie-Claire Blais.

JACQUES CHESSEX'S VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ

This is a slim jewel of a novel, based on the true story of a grave-defiling necrophiliac in the remote Jura mountains of Switzerland. It’s the turn of the last century and although this Ripper attacks corpses, not living women, his crimes send no less a shock through the community than Jack did through London just fifteen years earlier. Despite a similar level of hysteria, the local authorities get no closer to a suspect than London’s did looking for Jack. Not until two more graves have been violated, does a canton-wide alert for any sort of ‘perversion’ result in a stable-boy being caught having sex with animals in a barn, and he is tried and convicted of the crimes.

What makes this book so enthralling is the subtle way Chessex weaves elements of genre fiction into an examination of a backward and repressed society trying to cope with what we think of as modern criminal horror, but in fact seem almost a natural outgrowth of rural isolation, Calvinist repression, and intense social jealousy. The most obvious comparison is with The Crucible, where the same factors come into play. Chessex gets more latitude than Arthur Miller for two reasons. One is that his setting manages to combine a number of classic archetypes: he is near to vampire country both geographically and in the time-frame of the great Dracula story, and the grave-robbing recalls that other Swiss classic, Frankenstein. Turn of the century Switzerland also allows the new ’science’ of psychoanalysis to make its telling appearance.

But Miller also had a more direct allegory to pursue, in McCarthyism, while Chessex works on a more general point, drawing a distinct connection with our modern era, and its obsession with sexual frustration. Of course if you think of that frustration leading to violent hysteria, built on lies, you could apply it to any number of modern tragedies, from Iraq down to Columbine, but I think Chessex is working on a subtler canvas. Dr. Mahaim, the shrink who examines Fevez, the stable boy, blames society’s ‘primordeal squalor; for creating the conditions for ‘merciless horror’ but still one wonders. Fevez is convicted only after being released, when the psychiatrist has realised his perversions don’t include any active desires towards humans. He’s then re-arrested, and convicted, after he attacks a local woman who had flirted with him. His more proactive, as it were, approach to sex has been triggered by nocturnal visits from a mysterious ‘woman in white’ who has bribed his jailers. Chessex appears to be casting his net for society’s squalors just slightly wider than Dr. Mahaim.

Fevez was convicted, but escaped the asylum to which he was confined in 1915, went to France, and joined the Foreign Legion. He was killed in the trenches that same year, and turned out to have been one of the bodies buried in France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. So war turns the Swiss pervert into a French hero, and again, we’re forced to re-examine our ideas of society’s squalor.

Interestingly, while nominating the suspects in the case, before Fevez was arrested, Chessex mentions one who is a novelist, wrote ‘strange love letters’ to ladies in the region, and considers writing a greater ‘sacrifice than some young girl’s mortal remains’. It’s satisfyingly tempting to imagine Chessex pointing us in the right direction there. This is a novel worthy of the best of Durrenmatt, and that is high praise indeed.

The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex
Bitter Lemon Press £6.99 ISBN 9781904738336