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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
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