Review: Gilstrap breaks even with 'Even Steven'

"Even Steven"
By John Gilstrap
Pocket Books
Fiction
358 pages

In this story: Not as silly as it sounds Too much to deal with RELATED SITES

By Joshua Kuritzky
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- When it comes to thrillers, implausibility and outlandishness are not necessarily bad things: We must only willingly suspend our disbelief. This technique works for most examples of the genre. As the mythical contract between reader and writer says, it's OK to suspend disbelief as long there's either emotional depth or page-turning action.

But sometimes, as is the case with John Gilstrap's "Even Steven," mere suspension of our disbelief may not be enough. We must resort to more drastic measures -- perhaps locking our disbelief in the basement and handcuffing it to a pipe, just to be safe.

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Author John Gilstrap talks about his book, 'Even Steven'

For the first three quarters of "Even Steven," John Gilstrap comes close to reneging on his writer-reader contract. His plot is, if not completely implausible, highly unlikely. Bobby and Susan Martin, a childless and anguished couple, are camping alone in a national park. Susan's latest pregnancy ended with a stillbirth, and she and Bobby are both hoping that this camping trip will help them recover.

They are still lost in melancholy when they hear a young boy run screaming through the night, a kidnapper on his tail. Bobby valiantly struggles with the kidnapper and ends up killing him. Rather than calmly call the authorities, Bobby and Susan quickly pack up their camping equipment and head back to their car with the strange child.

Susan then convinces herself that the kidnapped boy has been sent by God as a replacement for her lost baby boy. Now Bobby must not only deal with the aftereffects of killing the kidnapper (he's afraid he'll be prosecuted for murder), but he must also deal with his crazy wife, who doesn't seem to think that there is anything wrong with keeping a stray child.

Fortunately, Gilstrap is a writer with enough talent to keep his novel from being as silly as it sounds. His only fault is that he is over-ambitious, trying to tell every aspect of the story from every character's perspective. In doing this, Gilstrap misses a number of opportunities to fulfill the "emotional depth" clause of his contract. Rather than spending the time and paragraphs necessary to fully explore a character, Gilstrap rushes off to the next character and the next subplot.

And there are many subplots.

It turns out that the dead kidnapper had an obedient, but slow and childlike, brother. The brother just happens to know where the Martins live. Meanwhile, Russell Coates of the FBI has been asked to investigate the murder, a process that involves coordinating the efforts of a younger agent, the appropriate forensics people, and a cute park ranger named Sarah.

And let's not forget April Simpson, the mother of the kidnapped boy, whose deadbeat husband set everything in motion when he failed to pay off his debt to the local drug dealer. As punishment, this drug dealer, a mean fellow with the standard entourage of up-and-coming thugs, had April's son kidnapped. April then calls upon an old acquaintance, a more powerful drug dealer, and asks him to deal with the lesser drug dealer. Shootouts ensue.

All of these concurrent stories would make a good, but exhausting, 1,000-page novel. Squeezing them into 350 pages, Gilstrap has too much to deal with. There are too many plot strands and too many characters. Some of the strands, and especially the ones involving Bobby and the FBI agent, are quite good.

Others, however, feel uninspired. The childlike criminal has been done before, and his imagined exchanges with his dead brother read too much like the device that they are. The drug dealers, although responsible for one very exciting shootout, are little more than stock characters, the kind of cartoonish villains that show up in bad cop shows.

Gilstrap rescues his novel in the last quarter, doing his best to supply the action required by the contract. The plot strands are only loosely tied together, but the climax in the national park is exhilarating and Gilstrap is at his best when writing action sequences.

When the plot strands do come together at the end, one is able to see the characters with a little more clarity. All the heroes, and especially the Martins and Russell Coates, are anti-heroes in a way, more bland than the typical thriller heroes. One senses that their appealing blandness is intentional on Gilstrap's part. They are normal people and they react to things in normal ways, often without thinking and sometimes finding themselves knee-deep in implausibility, having handcuffed their better judgment to the same pipe as our disbelief.

Gilstrap may not have completely fulfilled his contract, but "Even Steven" is entertaining enough that we won't file suit.

Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster)

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