Inconceivable

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

The first time Stieg Larsson's characters comment on the implausibility of the plot he's knitted them into, it's awkwardly self-aware and kind of charming. By the second time ("It all sounds a bit ... improbable"), you will excuse yourself for agreeing with them.

That's not necessarily a problem. After Memorial Day weekend, outlandish plotting and high page counts, like white shoes or straw hats, magically become appropriate. And if it's a little less important to choose a book based on believability, then it's all the more important it grabs hold as long as possible.

Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Knopf, May 25) should be a natural: the third installment of a franchise, with pixie-punk hacker Lisbeth Salander competing in the same weight class as twinkly vampires and Harvard symbologists. Less a sequel than a continuation of best-selling The Girl Who Played with Fire, Hornet's Nest picks up after its heroine digs herself out of a shallow grave despite the bullet in her brain.

Larsson takes the lurid velocity of that start, though, and continually saps it. Partially, this is because he separates his main characters for the bulk of the book. But it's as much a function of his style: No action occurs that is not narrated, then mulled over, then discussed. No conclusion is implied without being explicitly explained in dialogue. By swaddling every event in repetition, Larsson flattens out even the most shocking revelations.

That flatness is a shame, because it steals the prime pleasure of spy stories and horror stories and love stories: the shock of implausibility, the sharp edge of strangeness that punctures a comfortable, immersive narrative. Style can't make the impossible any more realistic, but it does help to nurture a willing suspension of disbelief. Coupled with a strong command of comfortable genre shorthand and the propulsive pull of plot, the summer novel is born.

The opening section of Justin Cronin's 800-page vampire novel, The Passage (Ballantine, June 8), overflows with delicious little shocks. Cronin is a highly respected Serious Writer with a PEN/Hemingway Award under his belt; his talents are not those of the typical monster novelist. But he knows when his prose needs to be unobtrusive, and knows when to open up a scene for effect. There's one early incidental bit, for instance, where a death-row inmate who "had been a Christian man himself from time to time" receives a visit from the husband of his supposed victim, born again in his bereavement. Cronin transforms this stock-character confrontation into a menacing and sad commentary on faith.

Cronin's ability to invest the implausible with raw resonance runs through The Passage. He doesn't just use his characters to advance a storyline; instead, the building blocks of plot serve as opportunities to illuminate relationships assembled from circumstance and shared struggle. The near-future prologue, an origin story for the diseased post-apocalypse of the main narrative, is excellent. And while Cronin's struggle with the task of creating a world a hundred years from now shows later, the strength of this introduction carries through the considerable bulk of the book.

Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge (Knopf, May 4) pulls off the same concentration on character. As a historical novel, Bridge might not fight against implausibility in the way The Passage does — but its story, which moves from Paris in 1937 to the liberation of Hungary at the end of WWII, also reconstructs a world grappling with the unthinkable, if not the implausible. However, where Cronin uses his considerable skill to scramble the conventions of a vampire story, Orringer surrenders completely, delectably, uncritically to the demands of the old-fashioned historical novel. Bridge is gently framed as an oft-repeated, passed-down love story: Andras, a provincial Hungarian Jew, comes to Paris to study architecture; he finds work in the theater, and falls in love with Klara, another emigre with dark secrets. The struggles of student life and jealous first love are quickly overwhelmed by the forces of history: deportation and forced labor, the Eastern Front and the chaos of collapse.

The historical sweep and the novelistic architecture of her piece are managed so well that the solid bones of the story's structure, the opening and closing of each of its acts, progress like a perfect ballroom dance or a well-laid feast, one smooth step to the next, one flavor to a heightened contrast. And if the love story is a little implausible, or over-sweet like saltwater taffy, that's perfectly fine for a long summer afternoon.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)