3 crampons out of 5

HCC 006

The unlikeable narrator is a hard thing to pull off.  The character can be fun to write because he/she can think and act in a way that liberates you from the normal confines of a normal protagonist, but reading them is then a gamble.  If the story balances with the lead in such a way to make continuing to hear his exploits rewarding and interesting – American Psycho is always a good example of this – then that is ideal.  Unfortunately, with too many or too little cards on the table, we’re just left with someone telling us about how mean or evil they are, over and over again for however many pages.

I’m not Dominic Stansberry’s friend (not for like of trying.  Domi, why you no write?), so I can’t claim to know the evolution of “The Confession,” but my reference to American Psycho is fitting.  Strip that book of its social commentary and violence and spin its genre to that of mystery, and you have an idea of how “Confession” reads.  Alas, lead character Jake Danser isn’t as charming as Patrick Bateman, and is sort of a ponce (i.e. he has a ponytail), so his narration of his own tail – a criminal psychologist who is suddenly accused of murder – suffers from the reader not really wanting to hear about it.  Now this all sounds bad, but it’s really the books only flaw.  It would seem to be a main flaw, but Stansberry’s clever approach to telling his story dances through his narrator’s words in a distracting enough manner to carry us through the frustrating chunks of story to the good parts.  It’s also not stripped completely of commentary, and when Danser is allowed to not defend himself, and instead begins to wander into surrealistic babble about the nature of self, it actually gets rather revealing and momentarily powerful.   But the main focus here is story, so that only goes so far.

The book is called “The Confession” and that is how it’s staged.  We’re not clear where from and when Danser is telling us this information, but it’s all after the fact.  This is also a tricky play, because it removes an element of threat for our lead, as we know (barring any tricks) that he won’t die during the story, but that’s not Stansberry’s direction.  Danser’s never in danger of death, he’s here to tell us his defense against these accusations, so for all we know, he’s writing this tale to us from jail.  Many chapters begin with justifications: I know that you think this sounds silly, but…  …and it actually works really well.  We’ve all told stories of this nature, where we know it sounds false but we swear it’s true, and it’s a clever way for Stansberry to quickly sidestep any eye-rolling Danser’s decisions would cause during the course of the book.

That being said, it all goes on just a little too long.  Which makes the “twist” toward the end questionable.  Everything here is laid out quite a while in advance, to such an extent that I can’t tell if we’re supposed to be fooled or not by what happens.  The book seems like more of an experiment in style for that reason, seeing how convincing one can write from the perspective of someone like Danser.  Otherwise, the supposition is that we’re supposed to sympathize with him and thus be taken aback by what happens toward the end of the book…  which, if I believe that was the intent, the book fails.  But again, to Stansberry’s credit, I kept reading, and was at no point frustrated by the direction of the story, just curious that it took exactly the direction it seemed obvious to take.

“The Confession” is an odd but fitting addition to the Hard Case Crime series.  It’s not quite noir or mystery – the setting is crabbed from these genres, Stansberry using it to test the waters for a unique character study with see-through whodunnit elements.  The telling of the tale is interesting, but it wears through its welcome quite thoroughly before the book comes to a close.