Douglas Kennedy
The Big Picture
Abacus pbk, 374 pgs, £9.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Douglas Kennedy's second novel, follow-up to redneck fest The Dead Heart, owes an obvious debt to the late Patricia Highsmith. The first half of The Big Picture at least is an accomplished rewrite of that classic misanthropy, The Talented Mr Ripley. Her talented and very single-minded Tom Ripley cold-bloodedly executed one Dickie Greenleaf, later to fully assume the man's identity. The best we can say for wealthy Wall Street lawyer and frustrated amateur photographer Ben Bradford is that he never actually meant to kill Gary Summers.
Bradford, you see, is going through a bad patch with failed novelist wife Beth. And Gary? Well, he just happens to be their neighbour and just happens to own the bed into which Mrs Bradford falls. And when the cuckolded hubby realises what's going down in their corner of the Connecticut suburbs he confronts his rival and, in the heat of the moment, kills him with a wine bottle. From there on in things will never be the same.
But you can, the talented Mr Bradford surmises, get away with murder if you are smart. Very smart. And that's exactly what he sets out to do, sensing at the same time that it's possible if you want - if you really really want - to be what you've always dreamed. Unfortunately for this homicidal clapboard Reggie Perrin, however, talent will out, and it all begins again when a picture - The Big Picture - slides into his viewfinder.
This is a far darker book than Kennedy's first. That was a simple, albeit grotesque black comedy that was both black and very comic. This is less forgiving. Kennedy doesn't have Highsmith's black hearted brilliance for making us oddly fond of her chillingly amoral Ripley. Instead he puts us through Ben Bradford's emotional ringer, willing us on by the sheer force of his story and its telling to buy into the great escape. And we do, not least by playing on the bottomless dread of Ben's new life totally excising his two young sons.
But as satisfyingly detail-driven and grisly as the first half is, the dying pages are too contrived. Within a few hundred words Kennedy undercuts so much good work, making the second half read like clumsy, dot-to-dot manoeuvring; as though, having painted himself into a corner, only trickery remains. On the plus side, he achieves something lyrical - almost profound - in the last couple of pages, but by then The Big Picture has slackened its death grip just a little too much.
The lack of bile (hardly Ben Bradford's problem) is what sinks The Big Picture. It would have perhaps been a tougher sell but a more satisfying read if our anti-hero had just vanished into the night. We keep reading because we want to know what happens, but, in all honesty, one is left unsure as to whether it was worth buying a ticket all the way to the end of the line.