Review: Entropy by Robert Raker

In thermodyamics, entropy is unusable energy; in literature and popular culture, it has become a metaphor for inexorable decay and disorder. It is the title of one of Thomas Pynchon’s earliest stories and a motif in some of his most emblematic works, including The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. And it is also the title and motif of an elegiac crime novel by Robert Raker.

 

Entropy revolves around a series of grisly child murders in a woebegone region of Pennsylvania. Raker excels at painting its dismal landscape: a once-thriving farm reduced to mire by a blinding rainstorm; a neglected swimming pool in which a small body floats; a sweltering bus.

 

He is similarly adept at delineating the desolate hearts of the four narrators who tell his tale in turn, in fractured chronology redolent of Joseph Conrad: the diver contracted by police to retrieve the victims’ bodies, a man more comfortable immersed in water than in the mainstream of life; a musician marred by more than the loss of an arm; an undercover agent corrupted by the criminal identities he must assume, and an artist’s model numbed by tragedy and betrayal.

 

À la film noir, there are no heroes in Entropy to solve the case and save the day; just tormented souls grasping in vain for happiness and human connection. And they are connected, but only like flies caught in the same web. The complex pattern of that web becomes fully apparent only at this compelling novel’s cathartic climax.