Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Book Review: The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on May 18, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Quiet Boy is not my usual type of book I review on this blog - it's arguably a legal/detective thriller, rather than science fiction or fantasy, although potential fantastical elements are present at times throughout and pose potential explanations for some of what is going on.  I'm an attorney in real life, practicing in New York, and so while I grew up loving legal dramas on TV (hello Law & Order), I've found it hard to enjoy legal matters in fiction recently, due to inaccuracies driving me a bit crazy.  But in books, trials and other legal references can often make me smile when done right, and so when I was offered an ARC to The Quiet Boy, which suggested two trials as well as a potential tie to the supernatural, I was willing to give it a shot.  

The Quiet Boy is unfortunately, everything I absolutely despise about the worst legal dramas in fiction, despite the claims by the author in the acknowledgements that he did research at a medical malpractice firm.  The book features an exaggeratedly incompetent and somewhat awful med-mal/personal injury attorney, two timelines featuring two trials - a civil in the older one and a criminal trial in the present day timeline - that are portrayed horribly unrealistically for no good reason, with just bad legal practices shown repeatedly in unrealistic ways, and then relies upon a totally impractical legal solution to come up with a "happy" ending.  And the characters themselves aren't really that interesting, or develop in interesting ways, with the more interesting of the two storylines essentially falling apart in the end into a really boring done way too many times before ending.  Just like, no.  Maybe for non-lawyers this might be okay, but even then I don't think it's worth your time - if you are a lawyer, skip this one HARD.  


----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
2019 - Ruben Shenk is just a line cook at a salad place, when he gets a call he never wanted to get - from his father, medical malpractice/personal injury attorney Jay Shenk.  

11 years ago, in 2008, when Ruben was just a kid who idolized his father, Jay Shenk took what he thought was the biggest moneymaking case of his life - a lawsuit against a hospital who treated a boy named Wesley Keener....who came out of surgery with an inexplicable condition of constantly walking around in circles, not responding to anything or needing any sustenance, as if he was merely an automaton.  But the case would not go as Jay or Ruben could ever have thought, and changed their lives forever.  

In 2019, Ruben had thought he'd put that all long behind him.  But his father has been contacted by his former client, Wesley's mother, in desperate need of help: for Wesley's father Richard had been charged with murder of a key witness from the civil trial.  His father, mistaking the word "defective" in Ruben's online profile for "detective," has asked him desperately to investigate the situation, and to return to the event from his childhood that traumatized him, to figure out what's going on....before Richard is sentenced to death.  
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The Quiet Boy is a combination of a legal thriller and a detective novel, with some potential supernatural elements featuring the boy who seems hollow (the eponymous quiet boy) and the cultish theories that a group of recurring characters have about him.  Those theories are never really substantiated besides in how certain characters react to them, with them forming the homes and despairs of a few of the characters involved, but they're really not that important here.  

What is important are the two storylines - the 2008 and 2019 ones, with the 2008 being a civil litigation legal thriller and the 2019 one being more of a detective storyline of Ruben trying to figure out what's really going on before it's too late.  The thing is that the book telegraphs where the 2008 storyline is going pretty much immediately by the very presence of the 2019 storyline (which takes up significantly less time in the narrative) - you know from the start that the 2008 trial would go horribly wrong, ruining both Ruben and his father, you just don't quite know how.  And that's a large bulk of this novel.

The problem is that it's not an interesting bulk, and it's one that relies upon a whole lot of legal bullshit to put it nicely.  Jay Shenk, our protagonist for most of it, is a portrayal of the worst kind of theoretical lawyer, the dude who literally has contacts at local hospitals to let him know when potential personal injury or med mal cases show up in injuries so he can show up at the scene to meet the loved ones of the victims to try and convince them to hire him (the supposed "Ambulance Chaser").*  At the same time, despite this web of connections, he....basically is utterly incompetent when faced off with a better opponent, is clearly grasping at straws repeatedly, and so most of his problems are due to incompetence rather than anything interesting, and who finds himself unable to actually know when to give up rather than dig himself into a deeper hole - which okay that's maybe a bit realistic as I know lawyers sort of like that.  The best Winters tries to do in making Jay interesting is to have him essentially empathize with all the characters he tries to con into being his clients or helping him, to convince himself he's helping or believing them, which I guess is fine (and yes that's also believable but it's not particularly special).  Jay isn't likable or interesting, and his incompetence is more annoying than anything as it leads clearly towards a tragedy.

*Shenk is notably also Jewish, which is itself a problematic trope with all the rest of his negative stereotypical attributes (and Ruben is half the time referred to as Rabbi for little reason), although the author is himself Jewish, soooo take it for what it's worth.  There is little examination whatsoever of Shenk's Jewishness or why it matters in the narrative, or even an explanation for why it would be mentioned here, which is really the problem.*

And like the law parts of this novel are just so so bad and unrealistic as to break the narrative.  The super rich competent lawyer Jay faces off against, the type whom he HAS to have faced before given his practice gut seems so off guard against, starts with an ORAL motion for summary judgment at a pre-trial discovery conference, which uh, should never be considered and should just result in Jay mocking, but instead it frustrates him and almost works.  The novel and Jay give an explanation of Discovery which is completely wrong, and then relies upon a surprise witness in the end to create a major plot twist, which again is just unrealistic as fuck.  And the trial part of the 2019 timeline is just awful as well - the defendant keeps insisting he wants to plead guilty against advice of counsel and that he wants to be sentenced to death ASAP, and the Judge acts like there's nothing she can do (which is absolutely not true).  And then the ending relies upon a claim that makes no sense, because everything Shenk has been doing has basically been on the record in front of the judge, and relies on a misunderstanding of how the appellate system works in this country.  

So yeah the trial parts, making up most of the 08 plotline, aren't good, but the detective plotline nor the character beats, showing the reaction of the Keener family to it all, aren't particularly interesting either....the mother wants desperately for there to be answers, while the father and sister want a quick resolution in anger or just confusion, and have moved on in various ways with the mother becoming withdrawn, the sister becoming a singer whose songs are all inspired by her brother, and the father being well the murderer for reasons that are the mystery.  Ruben is the prime character for whom we see most of these developments in the future, and other than him being traumatized by it all, there really isn't anything interesting about him - he has NO other defining plot traits other than regret....and there's nothing really for him to have regretted.  Like I kept waiting for there to be some reveal about his past actions, and there never is one.  And the detective case goes in some interesting potentially fantastical directions....that basically aren't fully explored only for it all to wind up with the most mundane and overdone solution of all (seriously, the solution must be the same one that shows up once a season in every season of Law & Order).  

So you have a legal thriller with bad legal work, not interesting characters, two storylines that go nowhere original, and....nothing else.  Hard Pass on this one.  

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