Hold Tight

Well I've settled safely into Amsterdam now.

I've got a quiet little apartment halfway between the harbour and the zoo. The only sound I get is Miss Lonelyheart, the woman who lives across the courtyard (it's a Rear Window type of affair which satisfies the Jimmy Stewart in me) who recently got dumped by her boyfriend and has been pumping out Blondie's Greatest Hits ever since. I'd been lying if I said I didn't love it a bit.

I've been pretty much housebound this week due to a cold so I just duck out to the local shop for supplies. It's a little more expensive than the "supermarket" down the street but it's worth it due to the teenage checkout chap. He'd be about 14 and his main drawcard is he looks like the supporting guy from an 80's teen movie. Not any of the Coreys or even an Anthony Michael Hall for that matter. He looks like the featured extra who you always see in the background of crowd scenes and ends up getting a snappy one liner at the climax after the lead character's done something cool to stick it to the man. You know the kind. They tend to wear unique sunglasses, smoke in the parking lot and often have a crucifix earring or headband. So while it means I have to pay an extra 3 cents per item, he gets to enjoy practising his English on me and I enjoy pretending he's saying something cool after I've led a BMX race through the school corridors to create a diversion so that the lead character can get to the roof to escape the evil headmaster and counsellors. Everyone wins. I've attached a photo of how I see him below.



But onto the real post.

Well kids, I've held off on delivering this entry for long enough. But it's now time to give you a certain book review.

I should preface this with a few facts.

I have read the complete Dollanganger Series. That's the wonderful Flowers In The Attic series for those of you who don't speak VC Andrews.

I continued to read the works of Anne Rice long after it was fashionable or even, for that matter, coherent in the case of books such as Violin and Merrick.

I've read novels by Jackie Collins, John Grisham and the autobiography of Roseanne Arnold nee Barr (My Lives).

I even read the much-anticipated sequel to Gone With The Wind, Scarlett. Every last word of it.

Yet none of these come close to the rampant mediocrity of Harlan Coben's Hold Tight.

My attention was drawn to this book as it was one of the Reader's Feast recommendations and it's plot bore a passing resemblance to a script I was working on. And alright, I thought it might be making a reference to the rocking tune by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch. I'll swallow my disappointment by simply saying I won't be shopping at Reader's Feast anymore. I'm also thanking my lucky stars that I'm not writing the worst film of all time.

For Hold Tight is bad. The Village-bad.

And I'm going to pop in that whole SPOILER ALERT thing right now because I urge you not to rush out after reading this review in the hope that "it can't be that bad" because you'll just be consumed by the biggest case of scheißebedauern since Halle Berry strapped on her stilettos for Catwoman.

"Every family has its secrets" - the cover cries out in warning. As it turns out, the deep secret the Baye Family are hiding is that they're all a pack of douche bags.

The plotline of Hold Tight is relatively simple. Tia and Mike are concerned that their son Adam has been unusually distant after the suicide of his classmate. Rather than, oh I don't know, parenting him, they decide to install some spy software on his computer to monitor his goings-on. Soon their worst fears are realised. Not only is he an emo, but he's swept up in all number of underworld goings-on that threaten to bring their house of cards crashing down around them.

It's testimony to the evil genius of Harlan Coben that he could take such a simple premise and turn it into the most convoluted car crash of contrivances ever to hit the page or as the Canberra Times put it "an astounding number of unexpected twists and turns that keep delivering surprises all the way to the last page". That there are, Canberra Times. That there are.

One such "twist" involves the character of Marianne Gillespie. We first meet Ms Gillespie when she's being bashed in the back of a van and the pain is taking her to another dimension. Yes. That is how her pain is described. For much of the novel, we don't know why Marianne has befallen such cruel circumstances, nor do we really care (because as you'll notice, she wasn't mentioned at all in the synopsis involving Tia, Mike and the apple of their eye, Adam) but we soon discover she has a daughter called Yasmin. Now Yasmin was once a bright happy child but is tumbling towards the way of emo after her school teacher, Joe Lewiston, points out she's a little on the hairy side and might want to do something about that. Poor Yasmin becomes the butt of many cruel primary school jokes - a plotline better explored in Judy Blume's Blubber. Luckily Mama Gillespie does what any responsible mother in her right mind would do - she porks Mr Lewiston, films it and threatens to show the video to his wife unless he quits teaching. So Mr Lewiston calls his mates, one of which has some severe anger management problems after a run in with some Serbian soldiers, who promptly bash Marianne to death, dress up her corpse like a cheap hooker and chuck the body in a dumpster. See? That IS an unexpected twist that certainly delivered a surprise for me. What does it have to do with the main plot of the book? Absolutely nothing! I guess Coben thought the main story needed a bit of padding. Or maybe that we needed a distraction from the fact that our central character, Mike Baye, is a total c***. And nothing distracts an audience from the fact that the lead character is a c*** by surrounding him with rapists, whores and murderers now, does it? I noticed with wry amusement that Coben acknowledges that this story came to him after having dinner with his friends Beth and Dennis McConnell. Don't you wish you were a fly on the wall for that dinner party?

So back to our central "story". Once Mike becomes convinced his son is up to no good (and I almost expected Mrs Walsh from 90210 to storm on screen and disappointedly ask "Not alcohol, Brandon?") he decides why stop at a little spy software on his computer and bugs his mobile phone too. Coben also notes at the start of this novel that "The technology used in this book is all real. Not only that, but all the software and equipment described are readily available to the general public for purchase." These are strange, heady times we live in.

Mike discovers his son has gone off to the Bronx (I assumed in search of Jenny From The Block) and with the gung-ho attitude of a man half his age, Mike decides to stalk his son. He discovers his son is frequenting a club for underage youth. It's kind of like the club in The Henderson Kids 2 except without the bird smuggling. It's there that Mike meets the dastardly Rosemary McDevitt who walks away with hands-down the worst description in the book when she's described as being "young, petite and had that sort of raw sensuality that made you think of a puma." Can't you just picture her? Rosemary is also flanked by her evil henchmen. Not Parsley, Sage and Thyme like I was hoping but Carson and his group of goths. Now I don't know about you, but I find goths to be possibly the least threatening subculture on earth, falling in behind hippies playing djembes at Queen Vic market and candy ravers with angel wings and Chupa Chups. In fact, the only time I've ever seen a goth engaged in violence was outside Maccas on Swanston St late one evening when a young lass from Broadmeadows tried to take down an androgynous young Trent Reznor wannabe for looking covetously at her McFlurry. But I digress, a trick I learned from Coben.

So Mike discovers his son is embroiled in shenanigans with a sexy puma-like lady and her murder of goths and has to save his son from a gritty life of Bronx crime. I longed for the days when teenagers in books could solve their own problems. Like The Gathering, Judy Blume's Blubber or indeed, even the great V.C. Andrews' epic Flowers In The Attic. But Mike's clearly one of those happy-go-lucky baby boomers who's shocked and appalled at the failing morality of todays kids and isn't afraid to judge them harshly based on their appearances and interfere mercilessly with their lives. As he observes of Gen Y, "They wore chains and had strange facial (and probably corporeal) piercings and, of course, the requisite tattoo, the best way to show that you're independent and shocking by fitting in and doing what all your friends do. Nobody is comfortable in his own skin. The poor kids want to look rich, what with the expensive sneakers and the bling and what have you. The rich want to look poor, gangsta tough, apologizing for their softness and what they see as their parents' excess, which, without doubt, they will emulate someday soon." Now I'd forgive that for being one of the worst passages I've read since having to read the Stan Rice poetry that would start each chapter of an Anne Rice book if it wasn't so clear that the views don't really belong to Mike so much as they belong to Coben himself. And he's clearly not afraid to paint the younger generation in a black hue.

Not that the other characters come off much better. They all compete with each other for the worst name - Darryl LeCrue (a hard nosed FBI agent out to solve the case his way), Guy Novak (the poor ex-husband of Marianne Gillespie), Reba Cordova (a happy homemaker who goes the way of Marianne Gillespie), Dolly Lewiston (the less said about her the better), DJ Huff (son of Captain Huff - oh that I were joking), Ilene Goldfarb (a surgeon who stumbles upon another wacky rape case - wait for it, it's coming!) and then just to keep it real, Betsy Hill (the mother of the boy who killed himself. She wanders through the book wishing she'd installed sophisticated spy software on her son's computer. Maybe then little Spencer might still be shooting hoops in the front drive way).

All the women are either ball-busting, dried up career women or end up Marianne style. All the men just want to shoot hoops with their sons in the front driveway but can't because their sons have turned emo. It's a cruel world they live in. And if you feel women weren't treated badly enough for, you know, not being men, there's a real peach of a subplot involving a woman who is impregnated by a rapist, stabs him to death but then finds herself in a right pickle 15 years later when her son has a life-threatening illness that can only be cured by getting a kidney transplant from his father. You know. The dead rapist. Well, we've all been there.

But the worst part - the worst part of the whole novel isn't it's convoluted plotline. It isn't that it condemns teenagers as immoral, drug-pushing drones with no fashion sense. Not is it that curious Paul Verhoeven tendency to model its female characters either on whores or Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. The worst, most toxic part of this novel strikes on page 307 when Loren Muse (the latter type of female) and Paul Copeland (yet another irrelevant character) have a good old fashioned D&M about music.

Paul: I had this song from Missy Higgins. Do you know her?
Loren: No.
Paul: She's great. Her music is a total killer.

That's when I threw this book clear across the room and decided to stick to books with integrity, dignity and subtlety. Like If There Be Thorns.