Review: The Way Life Should Be by Terry Shaw

When I got my advance copy of Terry Shaw’s novel The Way Life Should Be, winner of Gather.com’s First Chapter Writing Competition, I started to read it with some trepidation and many reservations. I don’t think art of any kind is a democratic concept. Just because Snoopy Dog and 50 Scents are wildly popular doesn’t mean that they have more talent than Joshua Bell or Yo Yo Ma. It just means they are more popular. And Nora Roberts outsells such vastly more original and brilliant writers as Charles McCarry, Alan Furst and Joyce Carol Oates.

Knowing that Terry Shaw won the contest in the same way that American Idol winners take home the big prize, I had some doubts before I opened the covers. Was there some secret campaign, as I’ve read there were with regard to American Idol, to get Mr. Shaw to win? Or, possibly worse, to prevent a better book from winning? I don’t know, and if I had to guess, I would doubt it. After all, the stakes aren’t quite as high. No matter how many books Mr. Shaw sells, he is unlikely to have bigger income tax problems than Carrie Underwood.

To put my reading of The Way Life Should Be in some sort of perspective, I have been avidly reading mysteries for about 45 years and have had a professional life devoted to them for more than 30 years. I co-wrote the Encyclopedia of Mystery & Detection, winning an Edgar for it in 1977. Two years before that, I started a publishing company devoted entirely to mystery fiction, The Mysterious Press, and in 1979 opened The Mysterious Bookshop. I’ve edited more than 30 mystery anthologies, including the prestigious Best American Mystery Stories of the year, and have an imprint at Harcourt, Otto Penzler Books, which publishes only crime fiction. My personal collection of mystery first editions exceeds 60,000 volumes.

All this is just to say that when I read a mystery today, it has context and, because it’s my job, I understand what an author faces when he or she sits down to write. It’s hard to write a novel, even a bad one, and I applaud anyone who pulls it off, which is something I don’t have the talent to do. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to criticize other people than to actually do anything yourself.

The Way Life Should Be is pretty good. Mr. Shaw has succeeded in plotting a complex story well enough that he is able to mislead the reader with some excellent red herrings. While juggling several dinner plates, he never loses track of what he’s doing and they don’t come crashing to the floor. It is difficult to have several sub-plots threading through a story and have them eventually tie in to the main one, leaving no loose ends, and Mr. Shaw has done that, for which he should be congratulated.

The novel is set in a small fishing village on the coast of Maine, so it is possible to anticipate the arrival of Jessica Fletcher at any moment. It opens with the sort of thing one doesn’t expect in pretty New England locales when Paul Stanwood, a respected member of the community, enters a public bathhouse in a park famous as a gay pickup spot. When someone follows him in, he is surprised to see who it is. He is also surprised to get knocked down by a crushing blow to his collarbone by a heavy steel Maglight, followed by a vicious barrage that kills him.

John Quinn, who owns the local newspaper, has been a friend of the murdered man for most of his life and begins to investigate, confident that Stanwood, married to Quinn’s former girlfriend, could not have been the victim of a hate crime. His search for another motive uncovers some shady real estate manipulations worth millions, putting him and his wife in jeopardy.

This is all a good set-up for a complex but swiftly moving narrative. Having read so many mysteries over the years, however, I now require more than a solid plot for me to regard a book very highly. I want fully fleshed-out characters who are unusual without being bizarre, people with whom I can empathize or whom I can despise, fear, envy, love, pity–in short, real people. That is not the case in this novel, where characters are thinly sketched and often behave in a manner that seems utterly contradictory to their natures.

Also, I’ll take a lousy, cliched plot if the writing soars. I’ve never been able to follow the convoluted plot of a James Crumley novel, but the poetic beauty of the prose transcends the story every time.

Mr. Shaw is not a poet (which, I quickly concede, may well be an unfair criticism, as he hasn’t set out to be one). But there are elements of his style, if that’s the correct term, that have the earmarks of an amateur. He tells what someone is going to do and then shows them doing it: "In the meantime, she was going to take a little nap, so she curled up in a comforter on the couch and went to sleep."

In the wake of the James Patterson school of creative writing, Mr. Shaw’s usual paragraph is seldom more than one or two lines, yet he manages to use more adjectives in one scene than Elmore Leonard has used in his lifetime: "...the full moon burned like a bare bulb off the dark water..."

What purport to be journalistic pieces lifted from the town’s newspaper would have had any cub reporter fired after one day. No newspaper, no matter how rural and homey, would print stories with recreated dialogue befitting back fence gossips, yet they appear regularly in these pages.

Is it unfair to criticize a first novel, to apply to it the same standards one would use on someone’s tenth? I don’t think so. Books are sacred things, magical little objects in which may be found wisdom, entertainment, insight, beauty, even joy. When a reader selects one from the shelf, it is reasonable to hope for these things, no matter whether it is a first novel or the final one of a long and illustrious career.

Maybe an editor at Simon & Schuster will put in a few hours of overtime (and all editors work overtime) and fix some of these problems endemic to first-time writers.

Maybe Mr. Shaw’s next effort will be the way a book should be.