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T A B L E__T A L K

Women's fashion mags: Love them or burn them in the Media area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Hollywoodland
By Catherine Seipp
Option this column!
(02/13/98)

Like watching ice freeze
By Daniel Radosh
Bring on the cheerleaders! The anorexic gymnasts! CBS's Olympic coverage is a snooze
(02/12/98)

More is less
By Charles Taylor
"Titanic's" Oscar stampede points to a Hollywood future full of bloat and mediocrity
(02/11/98)

Come back, O.J., all is forgiven
By Vivienne Walt
Finally, L.A., gets a piece of the Lewinsky action, but not very much
(02/10/98)

Whitewater, mon amour
By Patricia Marx
Confession of an illicit romance with Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr
(02/09/98)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

Ha, I said, and again: Ha

___________FEARLESS SERIAL REVIEWER STRIKES AGAIN,

___________AND JAMES PATTERSON IS IN HIS CROSS HAIRS.

LITTLE, BROWN, 416 PAGES

BY JON CARROLL | I scanned the lobby with the hundreds of scurrying authors. They looked like ants wearing clothing. The pulse pounded in my head like a runaway freight train going down tracks of doom to the tunnel of bloody death. Death that I alone controlled. I had power. I was power.

I was prose.

I was reviewer.

Bestsellers. They had all written bestsellers. I knew them without knowing them. My Browning automatic word processor felt like a woman under my thumbs. I looked at the neoclassical façade modeled after the famed Baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome. I have done research!

Which one would it be? The pudgy author of inspirational tracts based on a weekend seminar on Buddhism he took in 1973? The fashionably dressed proprietor of a string of ghost-written diet books cleverly interlinked so that the current book debunks what the last book preached? Or the gray-haired man whose gait reminded me of Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States, born in Sumner Hill, N.Y.?

My finger twitched like a mosquito on a hot plate of beans.

The clock ticked ominously. Tick, tick, it ticked, ominously.

Finally, I recognized him. His writerly beard gleamed like burnished copper in the yellow sunlight. He was a bad man, an evil man, a man who made David Baldacci look like Raymond Chandler. He mongered serial killers whose twisted paths were tracked by Alex Cross, America's least convincing African-American detective. Yes! You see it now! You were fools not to have known!

James Patterson.

What was it? My mind was reeling like a Ferris wheel broadsided by a speeding train racing down the tunnel of death. Yes: "Cat & Mouse." Squat, pasty-faced editor David Talbot forced me to read it. Me, who had summered with Proust and wintered with Whitman. Patterson was in my cross hairs.

Ha ha, I laughed. Ha and ha again. I envisioned his brains sliding down the tiled walls so reminiscent of the Oyster Bar in New York's famed Grand Central Station. I remembered the oysters my mother had made me eat as a boy, oysters that had made me vomit, oysters that will never appear in this review again but will stand for motive anyway.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you write a book in which the hero is supposed to be critically wounded, and everyone acts sad, and the villain acts happy, and this goes on for precisely 100 pages and all of a sudden it turns out, whoops, the hero is not critically wounded after all. He's been faking to fool the villain, and also so that the novel can be called "surprising" in the press package.

Doesn't that make your blood boil like a steam kettle in the dining car of the runaway train hurtling down the tunnel of death? As a plot twist, that would be like the ghost in Hamlet reappearing in full flesh at the end of the play and saying, ha ha, fooled you all, actually I knew all about the poison and switched the vials and then wandered the battlements while you all screwed each other and killed each other, and here I am back to claim my throne, and don't that just harrow up your soul, Mr. Jones?

Patterson stopped, dropped to one knee, tied his shoelace. So he is human after all. I felt the beads of sweat stand out on my forehead like beads of sweat standing out on a forehead.

But soft! Let me give you another example. Let us suppose that the serial killer is too intelligent to kill at random. Let us suppose that there is a pattern to the killings, a pattern so deadly, so crafty, so mysterious, that the best minds of law enforcement agencies in three countries cannot figure it out. Let us suppose, indeed, that you, yes you, staring at the screen right now, you have been trapped in an airplane going from Seattle to Sydney and all you have is "Cat & Mouse," and you are reading it, your blood pounding in your temples, in profound psychic pain, hoping against hope that the intricate pattern of the crimes is at least momentarily diverting, is at least clever by the debased standards you are now calling your own.

But guess what. You could never have figured out the pattern because you didn't have the information. Also, the "pattern" is so sloppy and ill-conceived and just plain dumb that you can't imagine that someone somewhere at Little, Brown did not say to Patterson, "Jim, don't you think $24.95 is just a little steep for a plot you haven't even bothered to reread, much less rewrite?"

Had that been you on the flight, you would be up here with me now. You would have your own Walther or Glock or Uzi, and you would be waiting for Patterson to emerge from behind that pillar so reminiscent of the grand columns at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, Egypt.

Wait. There he is. You can do it. We can do it together. Feel the blood racing through your veins like a runaway oil tanker gathering speed in the Holland Tunnel of death? Pop him! Spare no adjective. Whip those adverbs through his quivering flesh. Noun noun noun! Ha ha ha!

Ha!
SALON | Feb. 17, 1998