Best known for his first novel The
Ice Harvest, which was adapted for the screen, Scott Phillips has at
last brought The Adjustment, his first novel since 2003. I’ll tell
you right off the bat that I think it’s at least as good, if not better, than The
Ice Harvest.
The gutsy move here was to have a very
unlikable main character, a guy who’s also the narrator. Wayne Ogden is macho,
self-centred and a bigot and is married to a gorgeous and kind woman. Yet he
still feels the need to sleep with other women as often as humanly
possible--and in Ogden’s case, it is very often. To him, men can be
business partners, clients or enemies; women can cook for him, go to bed with
him or shut up.
The story takes place in the late 1940s,
in Wichita, Kansas. It opens with Ogden freshly returned from overseas after
WWII: “And now I was back in my hometown, with a wife who looked like a
movie star and a job that entailed more boozing and carousing than actual work.”
In Europe, Ogden had been a supply
sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps. What he was supplying, while stationed in
London then Rome, was much more than the usual stuff required by soldiers. He
specialized in essentials needs that others couldn’t provide, and that made his
black market operation very profitable; but he didn’t always end up with
satisfied customers. Back in Kansas, Ogden starts receiving threatening
letters. The anonymous sender is seeking bloody vengeance for something that
happened overseas.
While Ogden tries to discover the
identity of his new pen pal, his full-time job is to protect his boss, Everett
Collins, from being replaced at the head of Collins Aircraft. The boss is a
wealthy man but his extravagances (drinking and whoring) are too much for the
board members. Ogden’s job is to foil the plans of the board by keeping Collins
under control, or at least out of the newspapers. Problem is, Ogden acts as if
he’s still overseas, running his own secret operation, and taking decisions as
if he’s beyond the law. Violence and blackmail are on the menu, blood is
spilled, lives end. Could there be some post-traumatic stress disorder in
Ogden? Most probably, but that diagnosis didn't exist at the time.
So what makes The Adjustment a
good book, you wonder? Well, it’s like the cliche about driving by the scene of
an accident: you can’t help it and you do look, right? In Scott
Phillips’s story, you do the same. Sensitive readers beware there is some
hardcore sex and some graphic violence, but also lots of good laughs, sometimes
even during the sex. At first you kind of like Ogden. He’s a man with a
drive, with a focus, with ambition. He’s cunning and funny and intelligent. And
he does love his wife. But because Ogden doesn’t care for limits-- or maybe
isn't aware of them--he crashes through. When you think he’s gone as far
as he can and that he’ll finally burn, he goes farther.
While reading the book, I often thought
of Lou Ford, from Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Ogden does
have some of Ford’s characteristics but he’s less depraved and he’s not a
serial killer. As with Ford though, Ogden also believes that there’s a good
reason behind everything he does: if he drops his pants with a woman, if he
blackmails someone, if he beats up or kills another; in his mind, he’s always
right to do it.
Like Jim Thompson with Lou Ford, Scott
Phillips successfully manipulates the reader via Wayne Ogden. He forces you to
stop on the side of the road, to look at the crash and then to get out of your
car to inspect every tiny details of this twisted wreckage of a man named
Ogden.
The
Adjustment is hardboiled, hardcore and hard to put
down.
October 2011
(previously posted at Crime Fiction Lover's website)
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