SCREWDRIVER

In Bloom’s novel, a private detective investigates several interconnected cases while battling his own addictions.

In California, Jean Barry is a private investigator with no shortage of cases to work—in fact, he has a strange surfeit of them, all of them entangled and convoluted to the point of being impenetrable. For example, he’s hired by Hel Lambert, a car salesman, to investigate an airline’s efforts to intimidate him into selling his lot—at one point, Hel is kidnapped and abused by a “gangly group of swashbucklers,” surely sent by company executives. Jean is also engaged by Charles Brubaker, the head of the airline in question, to find his vanished girlfriend, Vittoria Vitti, who happens to be an old flame of Jean’s. Meanwhile, a sketchy organization called Dynamo Properties, a “shadow operation by Hollywood bigwigs”—it’s never quite clear what they do—is keeping an eye on Charles, who has an initial public offering in the billions on the horizon. Additionally, they task Jean with spying on their own spy, Dohltrey, whom they suspect is a traitorous double agent. During all this work, Jean also manages to find time to help Monica, an actor who, following a public humiliation at the Oscars, is now involved in same-sex pornography: “She was never boinked,” notes the third-person narration. In part to help her, he pitches a movie idea to Rex, a film producer in need of a script for a project that he describes as “The Big Sleep meets Trainspotting.”

Trainspotting is an apt comparison, as much of this novel is devoted to Jean’s indulgences, which run the gamut from alcohol to peyote. The entire work is written in an unnatural manner that unsuccessfully aims for stylishness, as when Charles asks Jean to find Vittoria in a speech that’s nearly unreadable: “I lack the gumption for somewhat shoddy matters, this matter, in particular, concerns my self, my auxiliaries, and yourself, if you accept, the concern being that my lady has gone awry and I cannot be certain she may do harm to not only herself but also to the aforementioned parties. I am afraid it is a grave matter, indeed.” The primary failing of the novel, however, is not the incomprehensibility of its dialogue, but of its plot. For example, readers know that Dynamo Properties somehow manages to “control the media’s information overload” and spreads disinformation to its clients, but the practical details are left exasperatingly vague. The novel effectively approaches clarity toward the end when Jean is compelled to confront his ungovernable addictions and reconcile himself to the loss of Vittoria. However, neither of these promising avenues are adequately developed. Moreover, the prose style is frequently overwrought—a peculiar brew of classic detective patois and the pretentious postmodern philosophy, as when readers learn Jean feels rudderless: “The map was gone. Or had everything just melted into some amorphous form, magma at the core of a deep shaft that was yet to cool off into a form of considerable consequence?”

An exhausting novel with unbelievable characters, an unintelligible plot, and an unpalatable literary style.