Winter of discontent

The thrills in Green Girls don't cover the defects

By Al Diamon

Green Girls By Michael Kimball, William Morrow, 384 pages; $24.95.

Michael Kimball reads at Barnes & Noble, in Augusta, Jan. 3, 2003. Call (207) 621-1187.

Michael Kimball used to be a funny writer. His novel Firewater Pond was a witty and satirical romp among most of Maine’s sacred cows and similar animals. It was also what his publicity material refers to as “critically acclaimed,” a publishing industry euphemism for “didn’t sell a lick.” As a result, Kimball was forced to earn a living as a short-order cook, stevedore, milkman, and supermarket clerk, while continuing to write on the side.

Possibly as a result of those experiences, Kimball is no longer funny, at least in print. But he is making more money. These days, he turns out thrillers that hit the best-seller lists in England and Ireland and move enough copies in the States to insure he no longer needs to sling hash or bag groceries to pay the light bill.

But in deleting the humor from his books, Kimball has exposed some weaknesses in his writing that can’t be hidden under the large helpings of sex and violence he serves up. As a result, his latest, Green Girls, is a disappointment.

My gripe with Green Girls isn’t just that it isn’t funny. The unrelentingly grim atmosphere of this novel, set in Kittery, Maine, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, might work if the characters had more depth, the story was more believable, and the metaphors were toned down. Kimball’s prose simply isn’t up to the task of hurling the reader through the pages at such a pace that the logical inconsistencies, questionable motivations, and predictable plotting devices that are standard in the thriller genre go unnoticed. In the end, the story comes off as sort of dopey.

A struggling writer (didn’t somebody warn Kimball about the self-indulgence of writing about writers?) named Jacob Winter (his stuff is “critically acclaimed”), comes home from a Red Sox game to discover his wife is having an affair. Winter blacks out and wakes up in jail charged with assaulting the wife’s boyfriend and wrecking the house. He’s bailed out by Alix, a mysterious woman who runs an exotic-plant business called Green Girls. Green Girls is plural because Alix has a bisexual partner named July, more exotic than any of their plants. The free-spirited July catches an instant case of the hots for the uptight Winter (remember what I said about overblown metaphors).

Why did the mysterious woman bail Winter out? He keeps asking, and Alix keeps dodging the question — because she’s mysterious, you see. Also because if she revealed the contrived reason (there have to be a dozen simpler ways to accomplish the same thing), there wouldn’t be any story.

Like the reader, Winter quickly tires of this crap. All he wants is to win back his wife and son. But before he can do that, Alix calls him from the top of the Piscataqua River Bridge to announce her impending suicide. Winter and July arrive just in time to watch their mysterious pal go over the edge.

Or does she? Being mysterious, Alix seems to keep turning up after her death. Even more unnerving, people start dying near where she’s been seen. Winter, meanwhile, is torn between reconstructing his life, writing a new book called Bridge (about a down-on-his-luck guy who has sex on the span with somebody who resembles July), and solving the mystery of whatever the hell is going on. He moves in with July and her greenhouse full of palm trees and poison-arrow frogs, and starts playing amateur detective.

To be fair, the book isn’t bad up to this point. While the characters have more cardboard in them than a McDonald’s Happy Meal, the plot whistles along, leaving the reader little opportunity to gripe about its shortcomings. Even the mawkish scenes between Winter and his son (“Adults grow up, you know — just like kids do.”) are mercifully short.

But we’ve still got 300 pages to go, and Kimball can’t resist a little melodrama. In fact, he can’t resist a whole lot of melodrama. Nearly every chapter ends with some overblown pronouncement that begs for a lingering minor-key organ chord as the camera fades to black.

“As the iron treads rang beneath her heels, he was suddenly certain of one thing: he had to leave her,” Kimball writes. “For some reason, that prospect frightened him more than anything.”

Another example: “She gave him that incredulous look again, and Jacob realized it was the same look Alix had given him on the bridge, just before she jumped.”

One more: “As he ran back to his car, a more frightening thought occurred to him . . . that she would claim more victims first.”

Come on, Mike, Bram Stoker is dead. Buffy does the vampire hunting these days.

There’s more, including a gun-toting district attorney who spends most of the book ignoring the spectacular murder of a police officer to focus on nailing Winter for domestic violence. There’s a shaman or two whose magic smoothes over some messy plot points. And there’s a climax that’s simultaneously improbable and predictable, as well as incredibly lame.

What there isn’t is a satisfying sense of being thrilled. And when you’re writing thrillers, that’s a defect that’s going to cost you in the critical-acclaim department.

Al Diamon can be reached at ishmaelia@gwi.net.