Action! Adventure!
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan
In his A.V. Club review of Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Kevin McFarland credits Dan Brown and Jerry Bruckheimer for the recent explosion of adult adventure-mystery books, to which Bookstore is indisputably belongs. I’m inclined to add the Harry Potter series (books & movies alike) to this list, at least in the case of Sloan, who has crafted a witty, if not somewhat digressive book that combines the keen humor of George Saunders with a rollicking mystery involving secret codes, clandestine societies, and the role of literature in the digital age.
Our narrator is Clay Jannon, an out-of-work programmer for a bagel company in San Francisco. In his search for a new job, Clay stumbles into Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, an easy-to-miss densely-packed store full of largely unrecognizable titles. After a few weeks on the job, which includes little more than operating a register and not asking questions about the inventory, Clay begins to notice certain peculiarities about the store’s merchandise and clientele. Most of the books themselves are unreadable, novel-length codes of some sort. Enlisting the help of a childhood friend-turned-software mogol named Neel and a beguiling Google programmer named Kat, Clay launches an investigation into the history of the store and its cryptographic library.
From here, though, well…
Sloan does an excellent job of introducing each unique character, but once this is accomplished the plot seems to spiral out of control: suddenly we’re lost in a world of robe-clad scholars puttering around lavish underground chambers, centuries-old conspiracies involving the history of the printed word, and legions of hyper-modern computer hackers wielding complex algorithms for data configuration. However, I get the feeling that, despite how well-crafted these elements may be, this really isn’t the direction that Sloan intended to go. It all seems tacked on, out of sync with with what we know about these characters. We are beaten over the heads with the juxtaposition between the two worlds–the musty, aged, academic world of the bookstore, and the psuedo-futuristic world of modernity that Clay and his cohort occupy–a conceit that gets old pretty quick, as does the treasure hunt-like format of the group’s quest.
Moreover, most of it isn’t really necessary, not for what Sloan is trying to accomplish here: he wants to question the power of the written word. Are books still relevant? Who determines this? How has the digitization of all available information changed the very nature of knowledge? These are worthwhile questions to ask, particularly for Clay and his friends who, in comparison to the bookstore itself, seem to exist in a sleek technological limbo. But the questions, or at least their implications, are shouted down by the over-the-top plot, leaving the reader feeling somewhat unmoored.
The Art Forger, by B.A. Shapiro
The Art Forger is a lot like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore in its adventure/mystery formula: Here we have a guileless main character who, in trying to salvage her career, finds herself embroiled in a scandal whose roots extend back to the nineteenth century. However, in this case we’ve traded the cyber-lit world for the art world, and while the Shapiro’s prose isn’t nearly as vibrant as Sloan’s, her vision of the art world–in particular the realm of art forgery–is much better realized.
Our main character is Claire Roth, a Boston artist who has become a pariah after a scandal involving the authenticity of an ex-boyfriend’s work. Since then, Claire has supported herself by painting legal forgeries of well-known paintings for Reproductions.com (a decidely stupid choice for someone whose professional integrity has already sustained as much damage as hers has, but whatever). When she is approached by the proprietor of a high-end gallery to produce a copy of a Degas painting that purportedly vanished from the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum twenty-five years earlier, Claire reluctantly accepts, only to find herself, yes, caught in another scandal, this one involving the origins of the painting and, to a degree, Degas’ relationship with the musuem’s namesake.
What’s interesting is that the book is premised on a real-life art heist: on March 18 1990, two thiefs dressed as policemen stole a number of paintings from the ISG Museum, including several sketches by Degas (though not the painting upon which The Art Forger is based). This, combined with Shapiro’s extensive knowledge of Impressionist art and the mechanics of art forgery (in the context of the plot, the process is explained step-by-step in such a manner as to sometimes make the book feel like a how-to guide), is the real crux of the book, it grounds the story in reality.
Beyond this, however, the book flounders. Like Bookstore, The Art Forger is crammed full of double-crosses, bait-and-switches, and oh-my-gosh moments, except that in this case we don’t learn anything about the characters from them; rather, these moments seem to serve as a distraction from the apparent fact that Shapiro herself has very little idea who these people are–particularly Claire, whose seeming inability to discern the ethical pitfalls of the forgery scheme make it difficult to sympathize with her. Are we supposed to feel bad for her when her tryst with the gallery owner in question doesn’t turn out as she’d hoped? Her character is too underdeveloped and one-dimensional for us to form any real attachment, an unfortunate result of Shapiro’s turgid, unremarkable prose; the book is full of people saying things like, “Please…just hear her out. Maybe, just maybe, she’s onto something you need to know.” I think the author made the mistake of assuming that the audience would be too rivited by all the technical info to notice how sparse and convoluted the rest of the story is. I wanted to like Claire. I did. And I wanted to care about her plight. But unfortunately, The Art Forger is just another stock mystery masquerading as sophisticated character-driven fiction.
