[ephemeral]

TITLE: A Good and Happy Child
AUTHOR: Justin Evans
GENRE: Fiction, Literary Suspense/Thriler
PUBLISHED: May 2007
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism

Review: At its most rudimentary, all authors share the same mechanisms for success: 26 letters, plus a few marks of punctuation. So what characteristic elevates a novel to greatness from merely good? Perhaps...

- Plot? Important, but alone and apart, insufficient. Unfortunately, most novels that rely solely on plot tend to stint on character
- Characters? Crucial, but often great characters populate dull (unread) novels
- Dialogue? (Especially dialogue that does more than lay inert on the page.) Few authors use dialogue as exposition: to tell their tale and provide narrative thrust.
- Big ideas? Also crucial. For a novel to be great it must offer sub-text, not just the text or surface story (in general, its plot).
- Auctorial style? The pages speed by thanks to the plot (what happens next?!) but also because you feel the immediacy of the story and its characters thanks to how it is told

Justin Evans mixes all of the above with seemingly effortless grace in his first published novel, A GOOD AND HAPPY CHILD. We learn quickly that its protagonist, George Davies is a new father who cannot hold his infant son. This one act (or non-act) confuses and angers his wife. Place yourself in her position: the man you love and married, and father to your newborn child, cringes and shies away when you hold out your son for him to hold. Understandably frightening. Which is what author Evans does repeatedly, frighten his readers with matters mundane, even quotidian; not (always) with the expected Boo! moments.

Hoping to deal with the issue, the problem, Davies, on his wife's urging, seeks psychiatric help for his existential dilemma: seek therapy (anathema, for George) and possibly save his marriage... or do nothing and lose everything. As much as he loves his wife and want to save his marriage, his family, his sanity, he also is very reluctant to see a therapist...

"How could I resist? I was seeking your help, your skills. These were founded on medical science, medical training -- secular knowledge. Your world (as I perceived it in these sessions) represented the Enlightened Good Life -- education, competence, prosperity -- a French garden of secular virtues. My religious beliefs, on the other hand, splashed on the walls a wild spectacular of fear and hope. Christ heaving and bleeding on the cross. Demons feasting on souls as they plunge into hell. The ecstasy that might one day lift us from the grave. Between the two, a lonely vacuum yawned, where neither set of rules applied. Depression. Lousy marriages. The conformist game of corporate life. That baseline throb of anxiety in a city where you fought crowds for every job, every apartment, even a spot near the pole on the subway. If you keep fighting on both fronts, you seemed to say, the physical and metaphysical, you will lose. Choose your real life. Your hand reached for me. I wanted to take it. Did it come to this -- that if I were to accept all the good you could offer me, I must also accept, as a whole, the world-view that supported it? 'My father used to quote Shakespeare on this one,' I said, a conflicted smile torturing my face..."

As often occurs in such therapy, repressed and unwelcome childhood memories surface. George Davies cannot hold his son because, when 10 years old, he was possessed by a demon. The questions come fast and furious: how? why? why him? why then? how was he exorcised? was he exorcised? And so...

"I stepped back, wounded. She fumbled for the second key, hands shaking now. This violent separation from the past was too much to bear. Maggie and I opening this door together hundreds of times. Giddy. Grumpy. Drunk. Stamping snow off our boots. Sun-baked and sweaty. Maggie bending at the waist, Hurry, I gotta pee so bad. With shopping bags. With new furniture. With friends. With her gentleness and patience and beauty, Maggie had redeemed me once -- from the rootless misery of a volatile, self-loathing youth. Why couldn't she pull that trick again? Yet here I was, stale-smelling and red-eyed, pulling at her like a beggar. I was Grendel, a monster gazing longingly at a campfire from my place in the woods. The past seemed so close. I wished to reach out, dip my hand into that other dimension, be her husband again, rewind back to our first date at an East Village bar, drinking dirty martinis and swiveling on barstools like kids. I gripped Maggie's face with both hands. I forced a kiss on her. It worked. The sensations returned: her full lips, her scent -- same perfume, I noted -- the nearby jangle of earring, the tickle of her curly hair, her presence, her aura, the slight clamminess from a ride on the subway, the end-of-day fatigue... it was all still there -- a destination in itself, a place where I'd been happy..."

In addition to its textual relevance, the passage above elicits sympathy, even empathy, for the characters. As such it offers a meta value: it tells the author's tale fractally, in miniature. As the novel continues, we readers learn that possession can assume many forms, in addition to the obvious demonic (the novel's plot): Ideas, for example, can possess people. The desire for personal or professional success also can possess people, help propel them to objectives and goals successfully hurdled. The devil, as always, is in the details...

A GOOD AND HAPPY CHILD offers readers a story more bold than the typical horror claptrap. Pay careful attention while reading, though, to reveal all of this novel's many delightful surprises and twists, and frightening shocks. Justin Evans has written a cracker of a tale with bravura style. A GOOD AND HAPPY CHILD merits that one word exhortation: Wow! Or the three word plea, "Please read (it) now!"