Death of a Writer: A Novel - Hardcover

Collins, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596912294 ISBN 13: 9781596912298

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2006

Synopsis

For Robert Pendleton, a professor clinging to tenure and living in the shambles of his once-bright literary career, death seems to be the only remaining option. But his suicide attempt fails, halted at the last moment by the intervention of Adi Wiltshire, a graduate student battling her own demons of failure and thwarted ambition. During Pendleton's long convalescence, Adi discovers a novel hidden in his basement: a brilliant, semi-autobiographical story with a gruesome child-murder at its core.
The publication of Scream causes a storm of publicity: a whirlwind into which Adi, Horowitz and the still-incapacitated Pendleton are thrust. The novel is treated as an existential masterpiece and looks set to bring its author the success he's always sought – when, ironically, he is no longer in a condition to appreciate it – until questions begin to be asked about its content: in particular about the uncanny resemblance between Pendleton's fictional crime and a real-life, unresolved local murder. Enter Jon Ryder, a world-weary detective who could have walked off the pages of a police thriller, and the hunt for the murderer is on.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Collins is the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. His work has garnered numerous awards, including a Pushcart Award for Best American Short Stories and The Kerry Ingredients Irish Novel of the Year. His novel The Keepers of Truth was short listed for the Booker Prize and the IMPAC Award. Collins is also an extreme athlete and is currently training for The North Pole Marathon in 2006. He lives in Seattle.

Reviews

WARNING: English teachers should not read this novel except under close supervision. Do not mix with alcohol or annual evaluation. If you experience dizziness or feelings of sympathy with the protagonist, do not induce vomiting or self-recrimination. Drink milk and watch Sandy Dennis in "Up the Down Staircase." Seek professional career advice immediately.

The rest of us can consume Michael Collins's new novel about a suicidal English teacher somewhat more safely. But only somewhat. Death of a Writer is as caustic as it is brilliant, a concoction of academic satire, German philosophy and literary criticism mixed up as a haunting murder mystery that will leave you disoriented -- and deeply amused.

After Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Richard Russo's Straight Man, Jane Smiley's Moo, et al., the comedy of academic life is so well documented that to read those books cover to cover would take longer than paying off your student loans. But Collins's addition to this genre is strikingly smart and decidedly darker, a "glimpse into the gallows of despair that permeated the academic world," as one character puts it. Indeed, Death of a Writer burns with the heat of a million college blue books going up in flames.

We're introduced to E. Robert Pendleton, a clinically depressed, habitually recalcitrant English teacher at Bannockburn College. Founded by a wealthy Russian émigré industrialist, Bannockburn has since grown into a "venerable cradle of mediocrity . . . sold at exorbitant prices to talentless drones of despairing, wealthy parents." Pendleton arrived 22 years ago in a desperate effort to find employment after his career as a writer of experimental fiction fizzled.

Although he is apparently secure and comfortable in this intellectual pasture, "all was not as it seemed here," Collins writes. His employment history has been spotted with periods of erratic -- possibly psychotic -- behavior. Only tenure and medical leave have allowed him to retain his job. He has written nothing for years, and his life is a "failure bestowed with a title, with a bronzed nameplate on a polished oak door. It was that nightmare where you tried to run but your legs wouldn't carry you, tried to scream but nothing came out. That was the sort of silence that belied the long corridors of academic ease."

Disgusted with the "self-sustaining machinery of critical analysis" and "the incestuous nature of literary reviewing" (ouch!), Pendleton "felt at times like a priest turned atheist who continues to preach from the pulpit because there is no place else to go." In a moment of severe depression inspired by the arrival of a bestselling hack from his past, Pendleton knocks back a bottle of pills with vodka and consigns his meager literary corpus to a sweet, perpetual graduate student named Adi Wiltshire.

But once again, nothing goes as Pendleton has planned. First, he doesn't die; instead, he suffers a massive stroke. Second, while caring for him out of a deep sense of misguided guilt, Adi finds an autobiographical novel, called "Scream," hidden under his stairs. It's a discovery that finally awakens her moribund research skills. Collins doesn't let us see much of "Scream," but he lets us follow Adi's earnest analysis of the novel in a marvelous sendup of literary theory and academic masturbation. A weird homage to Stephen King and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Scream" describes Pendleton's various conflicts with members of the faculty, his tortured challenge of God's existence and finally his ghastly murder of a 13-year-old girl.

Convinced of its genius, Adi submits "Scream" for publication, and, in a marvelous lampoon of the machinery of mass marketing and critical commentary, it becomes a cause célebre, a sensational bestseller: "Nietzsche meets Charles Manson." Pendleton finally garners all the fame and prestige he always craved but now, sitting in his wheelchair drooling, cannot enjoy or even, perhaps, comprehend.

Collins certainly could have sustained this wicked satire to the end, but after the first section the novel switches to a gritty police procedural. A hardened detective named Ryder, haunted by his own demons back home, arrives to look into the alarming similarities between "Scream" and an unsolved child murder that took place around the same time Pendleton completed his novel. His investigation takes us deep into the grisly details of forensic medicine, child abuse and domestic violence in a small Midwestern town, never letting us forget that in this fertile soil is spawned "the new gothic of Jasons, Freddys, and Carries."

Ryder's inquiry is endlessly exciting, spinning through possible perpetrators and competing explanations, and even provoking new murders designed to stop him. In a dizzying whirl, each of these characters (including Ryder) becomes an object of suspicion. If it weren't so good, so creepy and unnerving, this shift away from academic satire would be disappointing. But in fact what Collins does by supplying us with this indeterminate story is lure us into the act of interpretation, both literary and criminal. At the start of Death of a Writer, we're smirking at the esoteric irrelevancies that fuel critical studies, but by the end of this frightening mystery, we're left wondering about intentionality, the anxiety of influence, the transmutation of stories, the stability of signifiers, the tension between fiction and autobiography as though these were matters of life and death -- which of course they are.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Irish author Michael Collins, whose Keepers of the Truth was a Booker Prize finalist in 2000, took great risks with this murder mystery, love story, academic satire, psychological study, and gritty police procedural—and they all paid off. Described as a "stunning tour de force" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), Death of a Writer brilliantly transcends diverse genres as it simultaneously juggles different plot threads. While the first part of the novel is smart and compelling, it really picks up speed when it transitions from a college satire into a frightening, unnerving police procedural. While critics were hard-pressed to characterize the novel, all agreed that it's serious literature.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Collins, whose The Keepers of Truth was shortlisted for the Booker, presents a sardonic view of academia in this literary crime novel. E. Robert Pendleton's heralded first novel secures him a teaching position at exclusive Bannockburn College in the Midwest, but his career is on the skids because he hasn't published recently. When an old friend, acclaimed writer Allen Horowitz, arrives at Bannockburn for a lecture, the despondent Bob attempts suicide but fails. While helping Bob recuperate, graduate student Adi Wiltshire discovers cartons of a self-published novel, Scream, in his basement; recognizing its brilliance, she and Allen arrange its reissue without the incapacitated Bob's knowledge. The successful new edition of Scream attracts the attention of cold case detective Jon Ryder, who notices close parallels between its story and a local unsolved murder. Collins keeps the tension high as the ambitious Adi, arrogant Allen and dogged Jon work together and at cross purposes to discover the truth. The philosophical and literary digressions may annoy some readers, but all should appreciate the fully-realized characters, lyrical place descriptions and dark, circuitous plot. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

As a has-been writer borders on death, a graduate student finds his long-lost literary masterpiece, a story of a gruesome murder. When it becomes clear that the fictional murder is based on a real-life murder, questions about the author begin to mount. There are two, possibly three novels hidden in this intriguing, if uneven, book. The first is a genuinely funny satire of both the modern literary world and academia. The second is a philosophical look at the nature of literature and the relationship between fact, fiction, and autobiography. The third is a murder mystery, although most readers will solve that as soon as the murder is revealed. Unfortunately, the author's seeming disrespect and dislike of his characters diminishes the effect of the novel. Still, this is an ambitious, if not always enjoyable, mix of academic satire and literary thriller. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596912294
• ISBN 13: 9781596912298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320