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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Island
Tempest by Michael Mewshaw |
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Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Revenge Michael Mewshaw
set his latest novel, Island
Tempest, on an upscale island resort called Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 3,
pp. 28-34: After Randi
left, Frank lit a cigarette, stared into space, and let space stare into him.
He shoved aside the piles of paper on the table. Each day’s mail brought a
raft of charitable appeals, preapproved lines of
credit, deferred compensation, and stock options. As a CEO, he had had to
delegate responsibilities, but he had always attended to financial matters
himself. Now he no longer bothered to open any envelope with a cellophane
window on it. Since sympathy notes about Dorothy’s death had stopped
arriving, he rarely received personal letters and could muster no enthusiasm
for professional correspondence. He turned, as he
inevitably did in times of duress, to The Worst-Case Scenario Survival
Handbook. How to Perform a Tracheotomy, How to Use a Defibrillator to
Restore a Heartbeat, How to Escape from a Sinking Car. Many entries seemed
aimed at the specific requirements of Because a panther had been
sighted, he reviewed How to Escape from a Mountain Lion. The key was not to
run or crouch down. You wanted to make yourself bigger, more menacing, by
waving your arms or flaring your shirttails. Playing dead might trick a
grizzly bear, but it wouldn’t fool a big cat. You had to show it you weren’t prey, you weren’t dead meat begging to be devoured. You’d
fight back. This last factoid
resonated deeply with Frank. Part of his problem was that he had begun to resemble
prey, carrion ripe for the picking. He had to remind people, himself
included, that he was dangerous, not dead. But how? Lighting another
cigarette, he lingered in the darkness and found himself musing about his
late father. He knew he took after his old man. So it troubled him to recall
how remote his father became as he aged. Had Frank inherited his emotional
detachment? Not that he wished to blame his father for his faults. If he
blamed anything, it was life itself, the black humorous force that knocked
you flat in the name of teaching you a lesson. In that Punch and Judy show
that passed for education, he considered his father a classmate. It was time to go inside
and eat. Because he had no appetite, Frank prepared his meals by the numbers.
Six o’clock signaled that he should refuel. He dined the way Weight Watchers
dieted. In dead earnest, he portioned out food and consumed just enough to
maintain vital functions. Though the kitchen, Dorothy’s high-tech heaven of
culinary worship, boasted restaurant-quality appliances—a Wolf range, a
Sub-Zero refrigerator—and a larder of gourmet supplies, he cracked an
aluminum tray of Lean Cuisine out of the arctic of the freezer and slapped it
into the maw of the microwave. He set the timer, and as
the machine ticked off its incandescent minutes, he stepped out of the line
of irradiating fire and ventured as a transient through the slow, mysterious
rooms of his once familiar house. He knew he wasn’t alone. He sensed Ariel’s
presence and advanced under the soaring ambition of the cathedral ceiling
searching for her. Furnished with odds and
ends that Dorothy had shipped to These mismatched
furnishings and mementos were as dispiriting to him as a mausoleum. They
might as well have been fossils. True, each item carried a history, a
subtext, of a former house, a family event, a personal milestone. But now
they all seemed pointless and as bogus as the ceremonial sword that had been
bestowed upon him by the Japanese minister of economics. When Dorothy had it
appraised for insurance purposes, she discovered it had been manufactured on A ping alerted him that
the Lean Cuisine had been waved to optimum warmth. He backtracked to the
kitchen, where Ariel was at the chopping block ladling chicken To Frank’s astonishment,
hunger, something near starvation, seized him. At first it had no object. Or
none he would acknowledge. He was simply suffused with an emotion that for a
man his age seemed as superfluous as an appendix. A vestigial organ that
might burst and cause septicemia. Then when it dawned on him what he wanted,
he exclaimed, “Ariel, the egret,” with a sort of gruff, off-putting bonhomie. “I wish I never told you my nickname.
Nobody but the blacks on my father’s farm call me that.” “Why haven’t you gone home?” he asked. “I hung around to talk to you. I’ve
been mulling things over in my mind.” Her accent carried the hard consonants
and flattened vowels of “Sit down.” He sat at the breakfast
bar. She remained on her feet—or rather on
one foot. At a distance, her slight build and fair coloring could be mistaken
for those of a young girl, but up close she showed signs of age and weather
and sun. She was in her late thirties, he supposed. Maybe her early forties. “I think it’s time I gave notice,” she
said. “Of what?” He steadied himself. Still
in his flamboyant magician’s robe, he wished he had on a pin-striped suit and
was behind a polished desk, armor-plated against bad news. “I feel bloody useless here. I come. I
swim. I goof around for a few hours and then bugger off home. How much can
that be worth to you?” “Look, if it’s the money, if you’re not
satisfied—” “No, I’m embarrassed to get paid. It’d
be different if you let me do anything.” She switched from one foot to the
other. “I value your company.” “You’ve got Mrs. Dickson’s company.” He tried to digest this, process it.
The plate of chicken “I’m a board-certified physio,” Ariel said. “A qualified masseuse. An expert
personal trainer. I have a lot to offer. You’re not taking advantage of my
skills.” “I realize I must look badly out of
shape,” he said. “It’s not how you look. It’s what you
do—lay about all day smoking. You don’t move from that chair. How can that
be healthy?” “You’re right. I should
get active and go to the fitness center.” “That’d be a start,” she
said. “You need interests, a hobby, maybe a dog.” “That’s what “Unless you know something
I don’t,” Ariel said, “I don’t believe there’s anything I can do for you.” “That’s not true.” “Yes, it is. You won’t
even let me stretch you or give you a massage.” She pronounced it mah-sage. The idea of her laying
hands on his body was almost as disturbing to Pritchard as her leaving him. “I could finish the rest
of the week,” she said. “But if you don’t mind, I’d rather start looking for
a new job.” “Whatever you like,” he
mumbled, swallowing the urge to plead, to bleat that he’d double her pay.
He’d get fit, start simulated Delta Force training. He’d become
combat-qualified. But he feared making a fool of himself. A bigger one. “I hate to do this.” Her
voice softened. “I realize you’ve been through a lot. But you don’t give me
much choice.” “I’ll be fine.” In full
dismissive executive mode, he plunked the chicken “Well . . .“ Finally
both of Ariel’s feet were on the floor. “I guess it’s cheerio, then.” He scraped his plate into
the sink and switched on the tap. Frothing water washed his dinner down the
garbage disposal. When he buried his face in his hands, there was so much
give to his flesh, such looseness of skin from bone, his
face seemed to pour into his cupped palms. But he could maintain this abject
pose only so long. A Zen master might quietly meditate, Western tradition
decreed that in these circumstances a soul should set itself on fire, go
ballistic, go batshit. Frank pitched out of the
kitchen and into the living room. It was so much easier to be mad than sad.
You just had to lift a fluted Steuben vase from the mantelpiece and let it
drop. Glass of that quality created little noise. It landed with a discreet thunk, quietly shattered, and spread glittering shards in
a pattern like a controlled break on a billiard table. By contrast, Baccarat
crystal exploded with a sharp report, its fragments describing an arabesque
that couldn’t be equaled except on the most expensive Persian carpet. After peppering the floor
with glass slivers, he threw in some Frank had been educated as
an engineer and hadn’t forgotten his physics, his grasp of everything from
Newtonian mechanics to nuclear fission, quarks, and black holes. But on the
event horizon he inhabited at the moment, he gloried in mindless innumeracy.
It was a thrill to break things, especially your own belongings. A child
could have told him that. Every manufactured object ached to fall apart, every human construct was dying to be
deconstructed. Beyond the alchemist’s dream of transmuting dross into gold
lurked the atavistic nightmare of precious possessions turning into trash.
Since in the end we are condemned to molder into an inanimate essence, why
not do some tonic damage en route? He grabbed an antique
ormolu clock, a commemorative gift from the people of the Frank’s hands closed on
the Japanese ceremonial sword. Worthless though it was, it had a keen cutting
edge, good for smashing plaques and trophies and framed photographs. It
knocked chunks out of the marble mantelpiece and mutilated the imitation logs
in the fireplace. Dragging him along, the sword cleaved open the Bibendum chair, decapitated the tulip table, eviscerated
the Eames chair, described cryptograms on the
upholstery and dented the tubular chrome frame of a Knoll couch. Finished in the living
room, he marched through the house like a drum major waving a baton. He
banged at Iightbulbs, cut down a coatrack, and scored the dining room table with blade
marks that might have been made by a butcher disarticulating a pig. Then in
the kitchen he rested. Behind him lay a horde of
destructions. Ahead of him stretched an expanse of appliances ready to be
razed. Although the Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator looked impregnable,
he was confident he could crush the cabinets and the crockery they contained,
mangle the microwave, and circumcise the sink
spigot. But for the moment he had done enough damage. He felt in top form,
deeply endorphinized. The next time he slumped, he
knew exactly what to do. The sword had endured
nobly. A few scratches and nicks. Nothing a whetstone
couldn’t repair. Frank laid it on the stove and went to dress for the
night’s party. Island
Tempest may introduce a whole new genre: fiction about executives. Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Island
Tempest.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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