NOBODY LIKES VICTOR Carl much, and Victor doesnt much like ...
In his first major case, in lawyer/author William Lashner's Hostile Witness, he was blindsided in court so beautifully that it's taken two more novels for him to (almost) escape the humiliation.
In 2003's Fatal Flaw he makes only passing reference to old times?Victor has either reinvented himself or moved into a parallel universe. Now a middling successful defense attorney, he's defending law school classmate Guy Forrest in the apparently open-and-shut murder of Guy's lover, Hailey Prouix (wonderful name). Guy has secrets, Hailey had more secrets than the pyramids and Victor holds an essential secret that could destroy his still-questionable career.
But Victor's put himself at the center of one of the most fascinating American novels of recent years. I credit narrator Victor as much as author Lashner because the style, plotting and incidents of the novel echo Victor's convoluted mind to the point where book and character become inseparable. As he whipsaws between self-contempt and murky attempts at redemption, the method and content of the telling skitter and veer in their effort to follow him.
Fatal Flaw, like the first two Lashner novels, is no legal potboiler, though the courtroom scenes are daring and breathtaking. Hostile Witness and Veritas, close to a masterpiece of genre blending, didn't make it big. I don't follow the bestseller lists, but despite reader raves, Fatal Flaw doesn't seem to have reached empyrean heights?a shame, because it's a grand novel on every level.
The plot is rich, convoluted, intricate and continually surprising, even when you think you have it figured out. The revelations seem inevitable rather than contrived. The writing is straight-ahead on the surface but filled with hidden influences and subtle turnings.
The opening chapters read like a cross between Dashiell Hammett and Gertrude Stein. Later, inversions of normal phrasing ("I had never imagined, before driving into it, how amazingly beautiful was West Virginia") reflect the sideways outlook of Victor. And in the midst of the most carefully constructed moments of serious intent, humor leaps out of the grass to bite you in the preconception. Lashner's sex scenes are superb and never gratuitous. Erotic piledrivers, they often say more about the characters than the characters can say about themselves.
Most important, the entire book rests on character. Victor alternately despises his limits and crows his minor triumphs. He admits to the judge at Guy's trial that he's not quite sure he knows what he's doing, but he charges ahead because his fluctuating defense is the only chance to save Guy?the man he originally hoped to see convicted. His careening from a need for petty vengeance to an informed sense of humanity somehow makes sense to the reader, if not to Victor.
Hailey?dead from the opening paragraph?becomes an almost mythic embodiment of woman as temptress, victim, manipulator and manipulated. She does evil, but greater evil has been done to her. You share Victor's confused emotions over her: unable to condemn, unable to vindicate. Among the supporting characters, I dearly love Phil Skink, Victor's unlikely comrade in (paid) arms, who looks kind of like Wimpy and talks kind of like Popeye.
Lashner has written a novel that's not tied to time, place or genre. Even if you have no interest in legal thrillers, it's a gem.