5 out of 5

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A staggering sleeper of a novel.  I had no idea.  What’s more is that it seemingly takes the structure of a confessional and thus immediately put a somewhat bad taste in my mouth; while it’s a step removed (‘let me tell you a story about someone else’), the flavor was close enough that I started plucking out formulaic probabilities and checking off the clues as they stacked up.  …But they didn’t stack up, not really, or I had to keep delaying my guesstimate of the turning point when things would start to slide downhill, until I realized that this – this, what I was reading, 100 pages in – was the meat of the story, and Mr. Shubin had me wrapped up in this excruciating study of one man’s – Alan’s – guilt, and the ripples it would cause in his life, all from an event when he was fifteen.  What makes it even more stomach-churningly effective is that the story is purposefully played so straight that every readerly desire is asking for one of these details to drop away, to give Alan a break.  And this is where it becomes noir, and why it deserved a seat at the Hard Case table – because the moral here slots right in with the ineluctable fate found for most noir principles: that that guilt was so real, so palpable, that it acted as effect and cause for all of the plot developments.  Even a seeming red herring is important for what it means to Alan.

But we’re being told this by Colin, Alan’s childhood pal and caretaker, and we’re being told it as a recollection of things passed.  Shubin is smart enough not to dangle the b.s. future cliffhangers, though, the “You may have heard otherwise”s or the “If only I’d knowns” that are cheap ploys at inserting suspense regarding things that aren’t really around the corner; occasionally we are told that Alan won’t see a character again, or something similar, but it’s always added as a note of sadness, just piling it on and on.

The story is the story; the roundabout explanation of Alan’s regrets are part of the process.  Through the process we get an incredible character study, where every action and thought is human because it’s an expression of Alan’s personality, and the more we get to know him the more we realize how little in the book is superfluous or plotting padding.  In fact, except for Shubin taking his time to set the tone (talking about Alan through Colin, whom we’re not introduced to until well into the book), its possible that none of this is filler.  Ugh.

The language is clear and concise – there’s no hard-boiled talk here, and best of all, besides being fully-fleshed out humans, the characters are logical.  Alan starts a relationship in the book that seems a bit idealistic, but when you find out more about Anna’s family, it, too makes sense, and their teeter-totteringly childlike patter is all too true to form.  Shubin had a 1953 bestseller, and this book was written in 2006, apparently.  Let’s say ‘Anyone’s My Name’ was written when Shubin was, ahem, a year old.  That would make him, at the minimum, 53 years old at the time of ‘Witness’s publication… and we’ll go ahead and slide that to 50, assuming that HCC got rights to something that was waiting to be published for a bit.  I’ve read a good chunk of ‘modern’ books by older writers (not that 50 would be that old, but yer not a bright eyed youngster any longer, yes?), and though sometimes they can be surprisingly fresh feeling, there will generally be some moment that gives away that the writer didn’t grow up with, say, the internet.  But Alan hops online frequently and all of his steps are logical.  Colin is a writer and the honest apprisal of the magazine / book biz feels right for a character of his age…  In other words, I’m resupporting that there’s nothing in the book to take you out of the moment.

Double ugh.

Anyhow.  If you’re like me and love feeling horrible, let yourself be dragged down into despair by ‘Witness to Myself.’