Edward Inman has a problem. He wakes up in the middle of the night, every night, hurtled upward from sleep by some indescribable and seemingly unmotivated sense of panic.
Wary of disturbing his sleeping family, he has taken to haunting the empty homes of his clients, rich weekenders who pay his company, Stoneleigh Sentinel Security, to guard the premises.
One night, Edward takes a call that isn't a call, an apparent false alarm at the ultra-exclusive retreat of Doyle Cutler. This reclusive financier isn't happy to see his security contractor, yet seems remarkably unconcerned that the closed-circuit video feed of his pool has gone blank.
Security, by Stephen Amidon, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 276 pages, $31
Sent on his way, a somewhat puzzled Edward recognizes a drunken figure stumbling down the road: Conor, the wobbly son of an old flame.
Electing to pick him up and return him safely home, Edward sets into motion of a chain of events that roils the placid surface of his small town. The ripples lap at everything from a lucrative real-estate development to a highly charged writing seminar at the university. They even threaten to swamp the promising mayoral campaign of an ambitious local politician, Meg Inman, Edward's wife.
Security shifts between the narrative perspective of Edward; his one-time girlfriend and now-struggling mother of two, Kathryn; Angela, a coed who is smitten with her English professor; and Walt, the town drunk and the father of one of Angela's classmates. At the heart of this novel is a mystery: What happened to Mary, Walt's daughter, that night up at the Cutler place? Edward finds himself with a surprising personal stake in the outcome and is forced to revisit choices he made 20 years ago.
What distinguishes Stephen Amidon's writing is his acute sensitivity to the increasingly brittle nature of middle-class existence
What distinguishes Stephen Amidon's writing is his acute sensitivity to the increasingly brittle nature of middle-class existence. The author of five previous novels and a collection of short stories, he writes powerfully about people who live in nice houses and the compromises they make to stay in them: the second mortgages, the second marriages, the second thoughts. Beneath a thin veneer of affluence, uncertainty and anxiety thrive. For every successful businessman like Edward, there are Stoneleigh Sentinel's eight guards, who “made sure nobody burgled the converted factories where their fathers and grandfathers had once held decent jobs.” Amidon's fiction takes place in a world that that many of his readers have only too recently recognized as home.
His last novel, 2004's Human Capital , maps this territory beautifully. It takes place in a Connecticut suburb and concerns the elaborate seduction by which a small-time realtor tries to persuade a hedge-fund magnate to let him in on a piece of the action. Eager to recover from an expensive divorce and anticipating Ivy League costs for his daughter Shannon's education, easygoing local son Drew Hagel prevails on his wealthy new tennis partner, Quint Manning, to let him join the fund, which he does by borrowing what he doesn't have and fudging what he does.
Unbeknownst to both men, a storm is about to blow in that will push the fund to the limit, threatening to wipe out its investors, particularly those lacking the financial wherewithal to stay in the game. This is just the backdrop for a series of events that will tragically bring their two families together only to split them apart, but it is a testament to the author that Human Capital is more relevant today – essential reading, even – than when it was first published five years ago.
The same, though, cannot be said of Security . While it shares the same social topography as Human Capital – namely, a small town-turned-exurb, riven by the tension between new money and old values – Security lacks the tragic sweep of the former. The problem is this: When you excel at sprawling realist narratives, size really does matter.
In his best work, Amidon generates a great deal of pathos by putting decent people into situations where self-serving instincts are reinforced and only intermittently punished. Herein lies the chaos of the moral universe in his novels, the restoration of which provides his narratives with inexorable momentum. In Security , which is much shorter than his last two novels, Amidon has less room to work with and so he takes shortcuts. Rather than as the inevitable consequence of a moment's carelessness or minor indulgence of greed, the plot comes together due to the scheming of a villain straight out of central casting. (Extreme reluctance to shake hands? Check. Fortune built on the misfortune of others? Check. Hints of perversion? Check. Blofeldian accessory in the form of a bald cat? Check.)
What's more, Amidon doesn't grant us privileged access to the villain's consciousness, so his intentions remain murky and unknowable. In Security , evil deeds are the product of a twisted malevolence rather than good intentions gone awry. This might spare us the tortured logic of wishful thinking, but Amidon's strength has always been his compassionate depiction of our capacity for self-delusion.
After buying his first house in September, Matt Kavanagh has a much better idea of what it means to live in Amidon's world. When he isn't there, he can be found in the English department of Okanagan College in Kelowna, B.C.
