Collecting Candace

by Susan M. Brooks

Small Dogs Press, 200 pages, paperback, 2005



The nameless protagonist of this neo-noir piece first
encounters Candace in a Florida bar, and is instantly captivated
by her. Long legs, skimpy clothing, cute face, suggestive tattoo,
beaucoup de bosomry — what sensitive, reconstructed
male ascetic could resist her? He picks her up — or is it
the other way round? — but not for sex: not only is she
seemingly oblivious to the notion that sex might be anticipated,
but his desire for her is entirely psychological, you understand,
rather than physical, so that an act of sex with her would
destroy the iconic Candace he has so swiftly created for himself.
He wants to discover her mentally rather than carnally . . . with
the carnal option perhaps left open for later.

What he discovers about her is that all the previous males in
her life — notably her three husbands — done her wrong
in one way or another, perhaps most particularly through their
quite inexplicable eventual dumping of her. It soon becomes plain
to the reader why all this inexplicable dumping went on: Candace
is a vapid moron of the most tedious imaginable kind. The
protagonist, however, effectively conceals this patent fact from
himself, finding her a constant maze of fascination and
desirability. He casts himself into the role of her Knight in
Shining Armor, and sets off, with her in tow, to exact revenge
upon those males in her past who have so grievously ill treated
her. In merry road-movie-psycho fashion, the pair of them
cheerfully and gruesomely slaughter Candace's exes, the
inspiration for their crimes being almost as much the searingly
hot Florida summer as the protagonist's obsessed quixotry.

This is a novel with a great deal going for it, and its
central premise has a sort of brutal effectiveness. However, the
fact that the central femme fatale is seemingly such a
complete bimbo, complete with a love for the Bible coupled with a
total inability to understand the first word of the New
Testament's message, means that soon the reader is filled with
the same urgent compulsion to escape her company as her exes
undoubtedly experienced. The protagonist is little better: the
novel's conceit, initially intriguing, that he can be capable of
such profound self-deception over Candace, eventually plummets to
become exasperation and even incredulity that he could be such a
halfwit. If she were banging his brains out one could at least
understand his addiction to her: is there a male who cannot look
back on protracted periods of gonads-driven idiocy? But that's
not the case, and can't be: he's made her into a figure of
chastity.

Collecting Candace could get around these problems if
it were exquisitely written. Unfortunately, the writing is rather
clumsy. Were the two central characters possessed of one single
scintilla of appeal, this roughness could add to the novel's
overall noir ambience. As it is, the roughness soon begins
instead to grate.

Oddly enough, Collecting Candace is worth reading
despite all these adverse comments . . . if you can stomach the
unremitting bleakness of its vision of the most Neanderthal
aspects of, and indeed members of, modern American society. It is
from such ground that there springs the culture-of-ignorance
whose current dominance has done so much to topple our country so
swiftly from the position of world leader to world laughing
stock. Brooks is to be heartily and very sincerely congratulated
on having managed, in such a brief work, to do so much to explain
this phenomenon.



This review, first published by Crescent Blues, is
excerpted from my ebook Warm Words and Otherwise: A Blizzard
of Book Reviews, to be published on September 19 by Infinity
Plus Ebooks.


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