'Orient,' a literary twist on murder
Dorothy Sayers, a lion in the genre, once wrote that "the detective story does not and cannot attain the loftiest level of literary achievement … it rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion."
Christopher Bollen is out to prove her wrong in Orient (*** out of four), a gorgeously written book whose literary chops are beyond doubt. Come for the prose, and stay for the murders.
In the Long Island, N.Y., town of Orient, the locals' eyes turn on a longtime resident bachelor, Paul, when he invites a 19-year-old drifter named Mills to live with him. Already quick to lock elbows against an outsider, the residents let their suspicions fall on the stranger first when murders begin.
Mills isn't without allies in this small North Fork community, however. He soon develops a crush on the lunky mean boy next door, methodically working his way into the teenager's bedroom. He also connects with Beth, a painter afraid to announce her pregnancy to her brooding Romanian installation artist husband.
From there Bollen expands his canvas to more and more of the town's residents, investing each with a life so specific and true that Orient fulfills fiction's most elusive purpose: to report accurately on life as it really is. The suspenseful premise is misleading: This novel is more Middlemarch than The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Given Orient's wisdom, however, it's curiously lacking in cleverness. With a mysterious mutant creature washing up onshore and a late-in-the-plot villain's confession, the novels's mystery elements can feel both outlandish and uncreative.
Orient is also somewhat hamstrung by its mixed narrative purpose. The novel weighs in at 600-plus pages, and not enough happens to justify that length. If one of Bollen's characters wants to wax for a page about how art is "a form of currency that could be cashed in like poker chips," the author gives him full permission to do so.
If its prose were any less beautiful, Orient would become frustrating. But its meandering narrative allows room for observations like "people were murdered so easily because they didn't believe they could be" or images of "teeth the yellow of a stamp's underside." Moments like these make me happy to forgive the book's chronic inability to get on with it.
For those hoping for a mystery that truly engrosses, Orient's pace doesn't match the intensity of its premise — this novel is a rowboat on a race course. Trimming a third of the text would have made for a leaner, more invigorating read. But then Orient would lose what it has, which are qualities rarer than excitement and suspense: truth and beauty.
Orient
By Christopher Bollen
Harper, 612 pp.
3 stars out of four
Eliot Schrefer is the author of Endangered and Threatened.