Plot, Not Politics, Is Where It’s At

John Wilson reviews “Pariah” and “The Proving Ground”

Dan Fesperman and Michael Connelly. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Faithful readers may recall my mention of a new novel by Dan Fesperman, Pariah, which I was very much looking forward to reading. It’s his fourteenth; I started almost twenty years ago, with his fourth, The Prisoner of Guantánamo (2006).

On far-flung postings during his many years at The Baltimore Sun, Fesperman acquired the savvy that informs his fiction. What’s most distinctive about his work is his resistance to formula; as I wrote in July, “I can’t think of anyone else in the field whose books have been so varied while always delivering the goods.” Alas, Pariah (which comes with an endorsement from one of my favorite writers of spy fiction, the young star David McCloskey) disappointed me.

The protagonist, Hal Knight, is an actor and comedian who finds himself (a bit improbably, perhaps) in Congress, only to become a pariah when a “profane, sexist, demeaning (and possibly inebriated) verbal tirade on a film set,” captured and circulated on video, torpedoes his political career when it’s barely begun. But then comes a wildly surprising chance for redemption, of a sort: a CIA team contacts him to propose a mission that will take him to Bolrovia, “a hostile Eastern European country whose despotic president happens to be a fan of Knight’s adolescent humor,” as the flap-copy from the dust-jacket explains to us.

Pause for a moment. If you are an oldster, like me, or even middle-aged, the phrase “hostile Eastern European country” in conjunction with a spy novel will trigger a rush of familiar images. But Fesperman is flipping the script. This imaginary Eastern European country, its name designed to sound absurd more than menacing, is deeply “conservative” in a pejorative sense; it is clearly a stand-in for Hungary, and its “despotic president,” Nikolai Horvatz, is a satirical stand-in for Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán.

Now it happens that there are (stepping back for the moment from Fesperman’s novel) people in the US today, “conservative” politically, highly educated, who regard Orbán with admiration. I know a couple of such people. I think they are mistaken, satisfying as it might be to counter what passes for enlightened opinion. But Fesperman’s novel (so it seems to me, at any rate) is pitched to readers of the sort who are nodding their heads as Big Explainers point out the unmistakable similarities between Donald Trump, on the one hand, and Stalin and Hitler on the other. Hence, despite Fesperman’s usual skill and many small satisfactions, Pariah left me in a very grumpy mood.

Thankfully, I received the new Michael Connelly novel, The Proving Ground—which I finished reading less than 24 hours after it arrived on our doorstep, courtesy of Amazon—shortly after putting Pariah down. It was both “compulsively readable,” as the saying goes, and deeply satisfying. This is an outing for the “Lincoln Lawyer” of yore, Mickey Haller (half-brother of Connelly’s signature creation, Harry Bosch). It marks a new departure for Haller, who has stepped away from his familiar role as counsel for the defense to put his skills to work for a very different purpose: “public interest litigation.”

The case at hand involves a flagrant abuse of artificial intelligence that led to a teenage boy killing his former girlfriend at the urging of a chatbot who has him spellbound, and the efforts of the company that produced the chatbot to suppress what actually happened. The courtroom narrative is superb, as always; the scenes from “private life” are of extra interest this time around (veteran Haller followers take note); and the Southern California setting, always well rendered, is particularly important in this installment, since late in the process Connelly incorporated in the narrative the devastating fires that touched the lives of many people Wendy and I know (we lived in Pasadena for decades).

This is Connelly’s forty-first novel. Here’s hoping he’ll reach fifty—and that I will be around to read (and write about!) that milestone-book.