Literature Can Turn Most Lethal
By Janet Maslin
Will Lavender
DOMINANCE
By Will Lavender
353 pages. Simon & Schuster. $25.
The setting: a college classroom in Vermont. The year:
1994. The topic: Unraveling a Literary Mystery. The professor: the most
brilliant man in captivity, and he actually is in captivity, confined to prison for
the 1982 murders of two female students. If Dr. Richard Aldiss reminds you of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, you are as smart as the nine
super-special students in this class.
The teaching method: Socratic/pedantic. Dr. Aldiss
instructs by asking questions about the even more brilliant, reclusive,
mysterious writer Paul Fallows, who published two books then disappeared. One
of these books is so confounding that it is said to be “like ‘Finnegans
Wake’ on steroids.” The other sounds like watered-down
Edith Wharton. Still, it is said to possess the ability to blow minds.
All of the above comes from “Dominance” by Will Lavender,
a former literature professor whose first book, “Obedience,” also had a bondage-inspired
title. Mr. Lavender should be able to write his third, fourth and fifth
puzzle-crazy potboilers on the visceral strength of the first two.
“Dominance” is quick and complicated, in a wishfully
“Da Vinci Code” way. But it is also very narrow, à la Agatha Christie. So it cuts
between the 1994 Jasper College class and a present-day reunion of the
students, who are summoned back to campus when a copycat killer begins
mimicking the murders for which Aldiss was convicted. These murders are
distinctive. The killer covers victims with books and leaves a Rorschach
butterfly pattern nearby.
“We’ve had ...something happen at Jasper,” Alex
Shipley, who was one of Aldiss’s students, is told, after the second round of
murder begins.“Oh God. Oh
no. Not again, please,” Alex
thinks, in italics. But she is being disingenuous. She loves this stuff.
“Dominance” is for people who love this stuff too. It is for people who
understand, à la “This Is Spinal Tap,” that there is a fine line
between stupid and clever.
Enjoy the silly part. Stanley M. Fisk, the Jasper dean
who specializes in goading Aldiss’s students, tells Alex: “He wants everyone
who is watching — and the nine of you are not the only ones watching, you have
to know that — to believe he is merely teaching a literature course. But it is
so much more than that. So much more.” How much more? Enough so that students
who read Paul Fallows are ineluctably drawn into a hush-hush labyrinthine game
that “Dominance” calls “the Procedure.” The Procedure is said to be thrilling,
exalting, illuminating, surprising, elitist and very, very important. If Ayn
Rand taught at Jasper, she would probably approve.
And if the Procedure were Kool-Aid, not every
“Dominance” reader would drink it. Whenever Mr. Lavender has to cough up
samples of either Paul Fallows’s writing or Procedure-related behavior, he’s
got a credibility problem. So the specifics about Fallows’s writing are scarce,
and they are separated by lots of stalling. “But that is for another time,”
says the dean, who in the latter-day portion of the book is in smeared mascara
and an askew blond wig. “I
wouldn’t want to spoil anything.”
Eventually the surreal twists and blunt instruments
really come out. The screaming begins. And Mr. Lavender’s main influence
becomes Stephen King. But for all the derivative, mashed-up ingredients and
absurd grandiosity in “Dominance,” it does hold true to a big promise. Mr.
Lavender begins by suggesting that this will be a story in which clues to later
events are embedded in early ones, a puzzle with pieces that fit together
somehow. That turns out to be true.
Part of Mr. Lavender’s sleight of hand involves
flattering the reader’s keen intelligence while also spelling out the very,
very obvious. Alex went on from Jasper to Harvard. She became famous for
helping to exonerate Aldiss after the original class. And a detective on the
scene of the present-day crimes tells her that he studied her work “back in
police school.” He goes on: “The others — they laughed it off. An English major
solving a murder? Some joke. But I was always fascinated by what you were able
to do.”
Amazingly the same book depicts Alex sharing dinner
with Aldiss and marveling at his genius as follows: “His hands moved. She watched
his fingers dance from glass to knife to cloth and then back again. Glass,
knife, cloth. His heart was racing, his mind whirling. She knew it.” Then
there’s this, said by Aldiss: “There are two kinds of women. Those who have
tattoos and those who don’t.”
Mr. Lavender has the good grace not to drag out this
story. His book is tightly edited, with a lot of choppy leaps between 1994 and
the present, and with a lot of white space (à la James Patterson) to accompany
them. And he writes with real enthusiasm, if not with Fallowsian literary
genius. Yes, this book’s obsession with riddles and game playing is what one of
its characters calls “high nerd.” And the step-by-step revelations are howlers.
But it is sincere and not just a feat of cookie cutting. While writing lines
like “the Procedure is no more a game than a printing press is a machine,” Mr.
Lavender seems somehow to have believed what he was saying. He had to.
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