Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2005 Book Reviews

 

Island Tempest by Michael Mewshaw

 

Rating: (Mildly Recommended)

 

 

 

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Revenge

 

Michael Mewshaw set his latest novel, Island Tempest, on an upscale island resort called Eden, off the Florida coast. Protagonist Frank Pritchard was CEO of the company that developed Eden, and he continued to live there after a board of directors coup deposed him. Many of his former colleagues, including the current board chair, continue to live on Eden, and Frank causes an Island Tempest as he executes revenge against his enemies. Another neighbor, aptly named Randi, is a trophy wife between husband’s and she’s checking whether Frank the widower might suit her. Frank’s cohort, Cal Barlow, the paraplegic next door who’s in the federal witness protection programs, adds some character to the story. While reading Island Tempest, I kept thinking about how Carl Hiaason might have handled this. Mewshaw’s plot and dialogue don’t come up to Hiaason’s laugh-out-loud level.

 

Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 3, pp. 28-34:

 

After Randi left, Frank lit a cigarette, stared into space, and let space stare into him. He shoved aside the piles of paper on the table. Each day’s mail brought a raft of charitable appeals, preapproved lines of credit, deferred compensation, and stock options. As a CEO, he had had to delegate responsibilities, but he had always attended to finan­cial matters himself. Now he no longer bothered to open any enve­lope with a cellophane window on it. Since sympathy notes about Dorothy’s death had stopped arriving, he rarely received personal let­ters and could muster no enthusiasm for professional correspondence.

He turned, as he inevitably did in times of duress, to The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. How to Perform a Tracheotomy, How to Use a Defibrillator to Restore a Heartbeat, How to Escape from a Sinking Car. Many entries seemed aimed at the specific requirements of Florida residents. How to Escape from Quicksand, How to Fend Off a Shark, How to Wrestle Free from an Alligator.

Because a panther had been sighted, he reviewed How to Escape from a Mountain Lion. The key was not to run or crouch down. You wanted to make yourself bigger, more menacing, by waving your arms or flaring your shirttails. Playing dead might trick a grizzly bear, but it wouldn’t fool a big cat. You had to show it you weren’t prey, you weren’t dead meat begging to be devoured. You’d fight back.

This last factoid resonated deeply with Frank. Part of his problem was that he had begun to resemble prey, carrion ripe for the picking. He had to remind people, himself included, that he was dangerous, not dead. But how?

Lighting another cigarette, he lingered in the darkness and found himself musing about his late father. He knew he took after his old man. So it troubled him to recall how remote his father became as he aged. Had Frank inherited his emotional detachment? Not that he wished to blame his father for his faults. If he blamed anything, it was life itself, the black humorous force that knocked you flat in the name of teaching you a lesson. In that Punch and Judy show that passed for education, he considered his father a classmate.

It was time to go inside and eat. Because he had no appetite, Frank prepared his meals by the numbers. Six o’clock signaled that he should refuel. He dined the way Weight Watchers dieted. In dead earnest, he portioned out food and consumed just enough to main­tain vital functions. Though the kitchen, Dorothy’s high-tech heaven of culinary worship, boasted restaurant-quality appliances—a Wolf range, a Sub-Zero refrigerator—and a larder of gourmet supplies, he cracked an aluminum tray of Lean Cuisine out of the arctic of the freezer and slapped it into the maw of the microwave.

He set the timer, and as the machine ticked off its incandescent minutes, he stepped out of the line of irradiating fire and ventured as a transient through the slow, mysterious rooms of his once familiar house. He knew he wasn’t alone. He sensed Ariel’s presence and advanced under the soaring ambition of the cathedral ceiling searching for her.

Furnished with odds and ends that Dorothy had shipped to Eden when they sold their home up north, the living room had an eclectic decor, a hodgepodge of designs that had been popular over the past forty years. Dansk tables, an Eames chair, a red leather Bibendum chair, an Eero Saarinen tulip table. And on every flat surface, there were the awards, tributes, plaques, trophies, and framed photographs that Frank had coveted during his career.

These mismatched furnishings and mementos were as dispiriting to him as a mausoleum. They might as well have been fossils. True, each item carried a history, a subtext, of a former house, a family event, a personal milestone. But now they all seemed pointless and as bogus as the ceremonial sword that had been bestowed upon him by the Japanese minister of economics. When Dorothy had it appraised for insurance purposes, she discovered it had been manufactured on Taiwan and had a value of eighty dollars.

A ping alerted him that the Lean Cuisine had been waved to opti­mum warmth. He backtracked to the kitchen, where Ariel was at the chopping block ladling chicken Marsala onto a plate. She passed the meal to Frank, then perched on one foot, propping the instep of her other foot against her knee like a Masai warrior. She had pulled on a pair of khaki shorts and a white T-shirt, a neutral backdrop for the freckles spangling her bare arms and legs.

To Frank’s astonishment, hunger, something near starvation, seized him. At first it had no object. Or none he would acknowledge. He was simply suffused with an emotion that for a man his age seemed as superfluous as an appendix. A vestigial organ that might burst and cause septicemia. Then when it dawned on him what he wanted, he exclaimed, “Ariel, the egret,” with a sort of gruff, off-putting bon­homie.

“I wish I never told you my nickname. Nobody but the blacks on my father’s farm call me that.”

“Why haven’t you gone home?” he asked.

“I hung around to talk to you. I’ve been mulling things over in my mind.” Her accent carried the hard consonants and flattened vowels of Cape Province.

“Sit down.” He sat at the breakfast bar.

She remained on her feet—or rather on one foot. At a distance, her slight build and fair coloring could be mistaken for those of a young girl, but up close she showed signs of age and weather and sun. She was in her late thirties, he supposed. Maybe her early forties.

“I think it’s time I gave notice,” she said.

“Of what?” He steadied himself. Still in his flamboyant magician’s robe, he wished he had on a pin-striped suit and was behind a pol­ished desk, armor-plated against bad news.

“I feel bloody useless here. I come. I swim. I goof around for a few hours and then bugger off home. How much can that be worth to you?”

“Look, if it’s the money, if you’re not satisfied—”

“No, I’m embarrassed to get paid. It’d be different if you let me do anything.” She switched from one foot to the other.

“I value your company.”

“You’ve got Mrs. Dickson’s company.”

He tried to digest this, process it. The plate of chicken Marsala had stopped steaming and started to congeal. What could he tell her—that he was a saner, less irascible person with her around?

“I’m a board-certified physio,” Ariel said. “A qualified masseuse. An expert personal trainer. I have a lot to offer. You’re not taking advan­tage of my skills.”

“I realize I must look badly out of shape,” he said.

“It’s not how you look. It’s what you do—lay about all day smok­ing. You don’t move from that chair. How can that be healthy?”

“You’re right. I should get active and go to the fitness center.”

“That’d be a start,” she said. “You need interests, a hobby, maybe a dog.”

“That’s what Willow tells me.” He didn’t mention what he told Willow: he didn’t see himself scooping crap into a plastic bag.

“Unless you know something I don’t,” Ariel said, “I don’t believe there’s anything I can do for you.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. You won’t even let me stretch you or give you a mas­sage.” She pronounced it mah-sage.

The idea of her laying hands on his body was almost as disturbing to Pritchard as her leaving him.

“I could finish the rest of the week,” she said. “But if you don’t mind, I’d rather start looking for a new job.”

“Whatever you like,” he mumbled, swallowing the urge to plead, to bleat that he’d double her pay. He’d get fit, start simulated Delta Force training. He’d become combat-qualified. But he feared making a fool of himself. A bigger one.

“I hate to do this.” Her voice softened. “I realize you’ve been through a lot. But you don’t give me much choice.”

“I’ll be fine.” In full dismissive executive mode, he plunked the chicken Marsala down on the drainboard and shook her hand.

“Well . . .“ Finally both of Ariel’s feet were on the floor. “I guess it’s cheerio, then.”

 

He scraped his plate into the sink and switched on the tap. Frothing water washed his dinner down the garbage disposal. When he buried his face in his hands, there was so much give to his flesh, such loose­ness of skin from bone, his face seemed to pour into his cupped palms. But he could maintain this abject pose only so long. A Zen master might quietly meditate, Western tradition decreed that in these cir­cumstances a soul should set itself on fire, go ballistic, go batshit.

Frank pitched out of the kitchen and into the living room. It was so much easier to be mad than sad. You just had to lift a fluted Steu­ben vase from the mantelpiece and let it drop. Glass of that quality created little noise. It landed with a discreet thunk, quietly shattered, and spread glittering shards in a pattern like a controlled break on a billiard table. By contrast, Baccarat crystal exploded with a sharp re­port, its fragments describing an arabesque that couldn’t be equaled except on the most expensive Persian carpet.

After peppering the floor with glass slivers, he threw in some Meissen and Wedgwood for variety. Costly ceramics disintegrated into beige sand. One massive ashtray, however, accelerated at the in­variable rate of thirty-two feet per second, cracked the terra-cotta, and remained intact. To obtain pyrotechnic results, Pritchard had to impart a savage wrist snap to the ashtray, hurling it down with added speed. That cratered the tiles and unleashed a Roman candle—like eruption.

Frank had been educated as an engineer and hadn’t forgotten his physics, his grasp of everything from Newtonian mechanics to nu­clear fission, quarks, and black holes. But on the event horizon he in­habited at the moment, he gloried in mindless innumeracy. It was a thrill to break things, especially your own belongings. A child could have told him that. Every manufactured object ached to fall apart, every human construct was dying to be deconstructed. Beyond the alchemist’s dream of transmuting dross into gold lurked the atavistic nightmare of precious possessions turning into trash. Since in the end we are condemned to molder into an inanimate essence, why not do some tonic damage en route?

He grabbed an antique ormolu clock, a commemorative gift from the people of the Czech Republic, and flung it against the fireplace. Behind its arbitrary arms and specious numbers, it was nothing but a roach nest of springs and sprockets. In Brownian movement, they bounced around the room for an arithmetically predictable period before subsiding into inertia.

Frank’s hands closed on the Japanese ceremonial sword. Worthless though it was, it had a keen cutting edge, good for smashing plaques and trophies and framed photographs. It knocked chunks out of the marble mantelpiece and mutilated the imitation logs in the fireplace. Dragging him along, the sword cleaved open the Bibendum chair, de­capitated the tulip table, eviscerated the Eames chair, described cryp­tograms on the upholstery and dented the tubular chrome frame of a Knoll couch.

Finished in the living room, he marched through the house like a drum major waving a baton. He banged at Iightbulbs, cut down a coatrack, and scored the dining room table with blade marks that might have been made by a butcher disarticulating a pig. Then in the kitchen he rested.

Behind him lay a horde of destructions. Ahead of him stretched an expanse of appliances ready to be razed. Although the Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator looked impregnable, he was confident he could crush the cabinets and the crockery they contained, mangle the microwave, and circumcise the sink spigot. But for the moment he had done enough damage. He felt in top form, deeply endor­phinized. The next time he slumped, he knew exactly what to do.

The sword had endured nobly. A few scratches and nicks. Noth­ing a whetstone couldn’t repair. Frank laid it on the stove and went to dress for the night’s party.

 

Island Tempest may introduce a whole new genre: fiction about executives. Reading Island Tempest is enjoyable, but challenges any reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.

 

Steve Hopkins, March 23, 2005

 

 

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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC

 

The recommendation rating for this book appeared

 in the April 2005 issue of Executive Times

 

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