Fowler's latest mystery promises much, but fails to deliver
"The Jane Austen Book Club" could not have been better designed or timed. Karen Joy Fowler's fourth novel appeared in 2004 at the intersection of two massive forces in American publishing: women's book clubs and the Austen revival. With its sharp wit and clever allusions, the story rotated through a year's worth of meetings involving six members of a book club. If the plot was a little slow and tenuous, well, nobody minded.
Her new novel, "Wit's End," promises the same kind of bookish delight, and, again, it aims at an enormous segment of the reading market: mystery lovers. It's packed with parodic references to the genre's classic conceits and cliches, and there's a nod to Austen's own satire of mysteries, "Northanger Abbey." But Fowler's real subject here is the relationship between contemporary writers and their fans.
Our heroine is a 29-year-old middle-school teacher in Ohio named Rima. Her mother died almost 15 years ago, her brother was killed in a car accident, and recently her father passed away. Now alone, Rima accepts an invitation to stay with her wealthy godmother in Santa Cruz, Calif. She doesn't know the woman well, but she knows of her. Everyone does. Addison Early is "The Grande Dame of Murder," one of the world's most successful mystery writers. In her 60s and suffering from writer's block, she lives in a Victorian beach house called "Wit's End." The rooms are filled with Addison's dollhouses, each a replica of a murder scene that she constructed to plan a different novel.
Her famous detective character, Maxwell Lane, lives in the popular imagination with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. He's the subject of Addison's numerous novels, eight movies and three TV series. But Fowler is most interested in Maxwell's existence in the minds of fanatical readers, the kind of aggressive adoration that's grown exponentially since the advent of the Internet. Addison wages a never-ending battle against intrusions on her privacy, including a series of Wiki-wars conducted on the popular Web encyclopedia, with deletions and additions cycling on ad infinitum. Every possible aspect of Maxwell's life is analyzed on Web sites devoted to the novels, and he's the leading man in an ever-growing collection of stories written by fans.
Everything about this mystery-soaked setup promises high entertainment, but the biggest riddle of all is why "Wit's End" is ultimately so unengaging. Some of the problem stems from the fact that the novel has such a muted plot. Soon after Rima arrives to stay with her godmother, a belligerent Maxwell fan barges into the kitchen and darts off with the tiny corpse from one of the dollhouses. Rima determines to solve this miniature crime, but no one else in the book is very interested and, frankly, no one outside of it is likely to be either.
Soon, she moves on to discovering the nature of her late father's relationship with Addison. This investigation leads her to a defunct cult in which something dastardly may or may not have taken place 50 years ago. Although there's plenty of sensational material here -- charismatic sex-fiend! suicide! murder! -- these events remain distant, not so much mysterious as vague.
This comedy of manners isn't without charm; Fowler's subtle humor glides across these pages and enlivens them. And her exploration of the creepy relationship between popular authors and their fans in the Internet Age feels up-to-the-minute fresh. Still, a crime has been committed: Long before the end, the novel's life is snuffed out.