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THE
GOODLIFE is tagged on the back cover as being "Based On a True
Story" --- and indeed, it is a very fictionalized account of an
actual event, that being the ransom kidnapping of a high profile CEO
by a desperately broke suburban couple a few years ago. But even if
you happen to know that particular story by chapter and verse, you
will still find reading THE GOODLIFE a rewarding experience.
Keith
Scribner, author of THE GOODLIFE, wisely chose to focus his literary
camera on the emotions of the principals involved. The reader
accordingly gets to take long, revealing looks into the psyches of
members of two families, the Wolkoviaks and the Browns, whose lives
are about to collide and be irrevocably changed for the worse. Theo
Wolkoviak is on the long downside of 40. He is married to his high
school sweetheart, a homecoming queen princess who can still turn
heads, and has a son in college and a daughter with an eating
disorder that appears to be out of control. Wolkoviak has two major
problems: an inability to control his impulses and an ability to
blame everyone but himself for anything in his life that goes wrong.
A series of job terminations and financial reversals leave him and
his family no option but to return to the home of his parents to
live and to hopefully regroup. Malcolm Wolkoviak, a former police
chief who is inexorably succumbing to emphysema, can spot the
results of his son's weaknesses but is unable to see the root
causes, giving his son opportunity after opportunity to redeem
himself long after any redemption is reasonably possible. Theo
purportedly is working on a major project for the president of a
local country club, a project he claims will straighten out his
financial problems. What Theo and his wife are plotting, however, is
the kidnapping for ransom of Stona Brown, an oil company CEO, for 18
million dollars.
Theo
has everything plotted down to the last detail, and it is here that
Scribner demonstrates that he has the chops to become a major
literary talent. He quite deftly presents Theo as a man who is
detail-oriented yet, before a single element of the kidnapping is
carried out, also shows him to carry the seeds of his own
destruction and failure. It is quite clear within the first few
pages of THE GOODLIFE that if Theo succeeds it's going to be by
accident. It is far more likely that for all his attention to plan
and detail things are going to go horribly wrong for Theo, his wife,
his children, and his parents --- and, of course, for Stona as well.
As the story of Theo's big plans unfold, we learn his motivation,
his wife's pie-in-the-sky-dreams, and the secret sins of all
involved. Yet as one dream decomposes and simultaneously explodes,
in the end another is born. No one wins in THE GOODLIFE; a couple of
people, however, break even. Sometimes that is the best that can be
expected.
THE
GOODLIFE is Scribner's first novel; he reportedly is working on a
second, which, on the strength of THE GOODLIFE, should be worth a
long, lingering loo k. This is an important work that reads as if it
was a collaboration between John Cheever and Donald Westlake. Very
highly recommended.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
(c)
Copyright 2001, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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