Customer Reviews

The Room and the Chair

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This new novel can't quite figure out what it wants to be. A roman a clef about the Washington Post, A spy thriller? A technospy novel? A war novel about women? A chronicle of sad people and their inability to love? Too many stories, most of them highly improbable, are set in motion in a slow, barely moving narrative, which winds it's way through incessant digressions, to a resolution without climax, or satisfaction.

Some examples: A military airplane crashes in Washington DC and is covered up by a secret spy outfit for 18 months? Not after 9/11.

A cub reporter finds out that the managing editor of the Post frequents pre-teen prostitutes, and doesn't tell? Not in this media world.

An Iranian scientist escapes Iran, and then goes back because he is being followed? Why?

The writing is overdone, elliptical, and without any real sparkle. The character digressions are incessant, but they don't really lead us to understanding, or to care. The plot moves so slowly that I had to keep going back to find out if I missed something. I didn't.

An interesting comment from a friend on Facebook sent me rushing to the bookstore. I'm a veteran of 32 years in the news business. This sounded like a fun read about how phony the news business can be and what puppets most reporters are these days. What a major, major disappointment. Adams' style, if you can call it a style, is to write in sentences that too often make no sense at all. I found myself having to read paragraphs two and three times in an effort to figure out what was being said. After struggling through a few dozen pages, I was tempted to trash the book. Instead, I decided to force myself to finish it just to see if I might be able to figure out how to interpret her cryptic writing. I never did. Even after reading the last several pages a few times, I still have no idea what was happening at the end of this bizarre attempt at storytelling. If you're thinking of buying this thing, don't. Contact me and I'll give you my copy.

'The Chair and The Room' is a knockout of a novel. It brings us places we have never heard of, into the familiar and then back to the recesses of the government's secret places. The novel opens our eyes to the unexplained and unexplored.

Lorraine Adams tells us that in this novel "I'm looking at how human beings here in all their wonder and mystery and frailty stumble around a lot." And, does she ever! The book opens with a female pilot trying to eject from a failed fighter plane over Washington, DC. She lands in a tree and then disappears to surface later in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time the 'Washington Spectator' or as we know it, the 'Washington Post', explores their journalists and the stories surrounding the politics and life in this oh so political town. In Iran an engineer is in the middle of disappearing from his country. He is an 'informant' of a high mucky muck in one of the government's secret organizations. This leads directly to the Vice President's office, and someone who is not liked by many. How all of these stories intertwine is the magic of this novel. The stories of the night editor of the Spectator and the young woman he hopes to mentor. The nuclear engineer and the tragedy of his family. The female fighter pilot and her mentor and friend. The sergeant major who leads the secret organization. We get to know them, where they came from, how they think and all of the intricacies that make-up their personality and their lives. A sledding party that ends in tragedy, a hotel room that is a prison, a newspaper reporter who has a big story but where is it going? Some of the characters will seem familiar to you, and gives us a little insight into the news world. Lorraine Adams, the author, worked for the Washington Post, but that is all she will say about it. Her previous novel, 'Harbor' was one of the better books I read in 2005. The familarity of terrorists in both books gives me pause. She appears to have an inner source into the minds of terrorists, and a feel for how they work.

Lorraine Adams has said that "The Room" is the newsroom, a place she knows well from working at the Washington Post for over a decade. "The Chair" is within the military intelligence community." These two organizations are forever in conflict. 'The Room' wants to know everything, all the secrets and and lies. 'The Chair' doesn't want anything known, no information, nothing passed to the outside world. The manner in which the two meet, is what sets this novel apart. It is a thrill to see behind the lines, to understand a little, how these worlds collide and how they work. The people in these worlds are so well written and drafted. We come to know them, and then..... The satisfaction of understanding the finality is not in this novel. We are left to wonder....


Highly Recommended. prisrob 02-13-10


Harbor

Biography - Adams, Lorraine: An article from: Contemporary Authors Online

The author has, I feel, some important things to say. Sadly, in this medium of the novel, she didn't say them with clarity and effectiveness. She has material for a good plot that could captivate her readers. But her prose gets in the way, markedly.

This seems to want to be an experimental novel. The prose reminds me of a hyperactive adolescent jumbling incongruent details and cryptic allusions into her sentences--to sound, I think, perhaps, like a wanna-be Virginia Woolf. In short, this novel is badly overwritten--almost to the point of being frequently incomprehensible.

Some of the other reviewers seem, to me, bedazzled by the writer's Pulitzer Prize credentials and heap praise on this work. I'm sorry, but my response is: you've got to be kidding. Don't get me wrong, I think the lady has some interesting ideas and some ability with words. But if I could, I would sign her up for one to three years concentrated training in fiction writing. She likely deserved that Pulitzer and is a good investigative reporter; but as a writer of fiction, she needs guidance. She needs knowledge of the craft.

The author constantly throws the reader into situations without real grounding as to what's happening, who it's happening to, and where it's happening. The author will introduce several characters often providing little more than their names (except for a lot of internal monologues), and as a result they become confusing. The point of view is frequently "floating," undefined or vague. She seems to have bought wholesale the contemporary poor notion that it's best to keep the reader in the dark most of the time. So the "story" tumbles from one barely understood scene to another. Worse: I should say, from one off-the-wall, partially understood and meandering sentence to another.

My guess is that this writer is trying to impress someone, maybe herself, maybe certain literary critics. But one thing's for sure, she didn't write this for her readers. They were last in her considerations, if they made it at all. The novel borders on the unreadable.

The first 2 pages of the book had me hooked. An extremely exciting start even though it took me a couple of times through those pages to be sure what was happening.

After those first 2 pages, I was lost. Continued introduction of new characters who did nothing, leaving parts of the story behind only to catch up to it later, this author has talent but uses it wastefully.

I read this book without ever getting an idea of what was going on. Not that individual scenes were difficult to understand because the writer is wonderfully talented, but nothing ever tied the parts together. Chapter after chapter I went back and reread to try to gather my mind around the story. I did that because Lorraine Adams has a fascinating way of expressing herself so I wanted to like this work.

I'm sorry, I just couldn't find a way to gain any reading pleasure. My recommendation would be to skip this one and wait for L. Adams to gain some experience in how to tell a story.

There are times in my life (usually when working with math) when I get confused and have to hold on to the edge of the table to know which side is up. I held on to the edge of the table a lot while reading this book. It was as if Ms. Adams had several ideas for a story but wasn't sure which one to use - so she used them all.

We start with a pilot (a woman named Mary with all the media attention that a woman almost losing her life would bring) crashing into the Potomac at Washington on a dark and stormy night. All right it wasn't stormy, but it was supposed to be dark (Is that what Black Ops really means). I have been to DC many times as I have relatives there. I don't think I have ever seen it so dark that a fighter plane crashing into the river near the Lincoln Memorial wouldn't be noticed. So, the pilot is supposed to not understand how her instruments went haywire so she crashed. While she is in the hospital, a group of spooks in black clothes, clean up the site, including uprooting the tree which broke our pilot's fall and flattening the site without anyone noticing it. May I point out that something like a bazillion joggers go through this area along the Potomac every day, and this is a City where no one, even under oath, seems to be able to keep a secret. After Mary is released from the hospital, she and her wing man are shuffled off to Bagram where the Wing Man and two other members of the staff on the Base fall over a cliff, one killed; two injured. Our "girl" is saved because, as a girl, she walks slower. So, everyone gets shipped back to Washington.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we have been introduced to a man (CIA?) who had the pilot's instruments messed up to test a secret weapon. There are also three competing members of the newspaper hierarchy (I think one of them is supposed to be Bob Woodward's alter ego as he helped break Watergate and he writes lots of books for which he hides information until he is ready to use it in a book. This, unfortunately, keeps his paper (The Washington Post?) from breaking a lot of scoops. Then there are two of their wives, Mabel and Martina, with similiar names just to keep us a bit more confused. These two are sterotypes of the newspaper careerist and the former newspaper careerist who is now a stay at home mom. They should both be talking with therapists. We also have a CIA asset in the Middle East who is either dead or not dead.

The CIA Operative needs to prove that his asset is really really really dead, not just nearly nearly nearly dead. He has to go to Iran to check this out himself and guess who he picks to act the part of his wife. In order not to give away the surprise in this story, I will let you guess. At any rate, the pair go through with their assignment, and we make it to the denouement. By the way, could someone who reads this book please write me and explain the ending to me.

Ms. Adams has such great credentials that I thought I was a little dim in not being able to follow this story without flipping back and forth to check facts. Once again, I think she had several ideas for stories. Much of this plot is reminiscent of recent news stories, and no one trusts the government any longer so it is easy to believe that a Washington insider would know what she is talking about. This is my first Lorraine Adams book, but I'm not sure I will try another. Still that is each person's choice.

Good Luck.

Wow.

I was completely convinced that the last scene in this book would be the protagonist waking up in an institution. I actually thought this was being hinted at throughout the book by the plot contradictions and paranoid conspiracy.

The story is, mostly, that the CIA is covering up some dastardly plot (I won't spoil it), and the protagonist, a female pilot, accidentally encounters this American Government underworld. The story takes you from the US Capitol to the ancient city of Bagram, Afghanistan. Many subplots and details begin to flesh out, every few pages, and seem promising... but they never really work together or flesh out well.

In fact, it's so difficult to attempt to reconcile this story that I have to conclude it was rushed together. Writing a novel should involve a lot of reworking various elements, cutting bad elements that just aren't working, etc. This didn't happen with this story. The woman rushes through an incredibly strange world of political intrigue that doesn't make sense.

It would have been much funnier, and somewhat believable, had she ended the story in a straight jacket, screaming that her medicine was trying to talk to her.

Humor aside, this is not worth a read, and most readers probably will find this too cumbersome and annoying to complete.

After stumbling across a highly laudatory review of this book in the LA Times, I bought the Kindle edition -- and almost abandoned it about a tenth of the way through. I did press on and was sort of rewarded with a intermittent scenes and conversations that had something going for them, but the book remains a huge disappointment. I don't necessarily blame that on the author. who is clearly smart and knowledgeable, but on the evidence lacks a controlling sense of when to let levels of smartness and knowledge die back a bit. This book had an editor, and the editor needed to tell the author to get a grip and decide whether she was writing a thriller, an investigative procedural, a fictionalized exposé, an arch social comedy of manners among DC policy implementers and their watchers (all seemingly with three-sigma IQs), or some better controlled blend of those categories. The editor also needed to urge on the writer avoidance of an overly idiosyncratic style of expression that features adapted vocabulary so bizarre as to be incomprehensible in context. "Grotty" does not describe a color; "platter" is not a verb (or, here, a participle applied to magnolia leaves); "sauce" is something sous-chefs do to a dish, not how editors walk as they enter a room. And finally, a serious editor would have forced the author to create a more transparent overall structure for the book that didn't make so much of what happens mysterious or confusing. Yes, it is in part a puzzle novel, so not everything needs to be revealed as the narrative proceeds. But slop does not rise to puzzle status just because it, too, is hard to understand. Along the way, it would have been nice to resolve (or just do away with) some preposterous plot devices like the initials on a sign in a riverfront park that basically announced "Supersecret Intelligence Agency Housed in Vicinity," or the red herring (it seems to me) of a storyline involving a new editorial appointment that goes to a man who buys the services of child prostitutes. Maybe we could have done with a few thousand fewer words of the rich interior thoughts of characters who sound as though they must have skipped their last dose of Lorazepam or took an extra Ritalin by mistake. Whatever the opposite of ADD is, a lot of these characters have it. And the last two pages! I am still trying to put that scene together. In a chaotic situation, the single pronoun "him" obscures which major player is out of commission. And are we to conclude that the surviving major character on the last page is now in the hands of relatives of the mountain village bombed earlier in the book? I would willingly have sacrificed dozens of earlier paragraphs for one more clarifying 'graph on the last page.

On the up side, I give the author full credit for the scene involving a newspaper story conference that occurs toward the end of the novel. There is some fine observational writing there, and the differentiated power among reporters and editors of varied seniority levels is nicely, even comically captured.

I understand why so many of the reviews are harsh - I had a relatively low opinion until the very end of the book when it suddenly struck me what this book is really about. There are two major entities in this novel: The Room (those who report on what is done) and the Chair (those that do). Whatever you may think of the Chair, they're taking real risks, some of them dying for what they think is the correct course of action. Meanwhile, the Room, with all of its petty internal drama, is contrasted as a complete and utter joke. Yes, half the novel is a waste of your time and that's the point - you don't need to care about the Room. They don't matter.

I'm in a bit of a dilemma writing this review. To be absolutely frank - I read this book in a 2 sitting which might indicate that I deeply liked it? Maybe.. but's its me. On the other hand there are thousands of readers here so I think I ought to give a disparate view. The book's colloquy is very easy to understand which is good. Easy on readability but somehow doesn't seem to "gel" well. Have you ever read something you like but somehow feel there's a rhythm missing? That's exactly the problem with this book. I believe the author attempted to bring in more than a thriller genre in the book and brought in Sci-Fi(?), pure mystery (?), philosophy(?).... don't know really. Also, I got this feeling that the author changed tracks while writing it. Anyways, as a book for a quick read: yes. But I just can't balance it with the price tag. There are better ones, much better ones in the market.