Going Deeper

Jean-Claude Kovan

I really didn't think I was going to read a worse book than Roger Hailey's travesty Museum this year. And, to tell you the honest truth, I haven't... yet. One of the worst, most frustrating things about Going Deeper is that it's reasonably well-written, at about the same level of competence from that perspective as the books of James Redfield (and whatever you think about the psychospirituality behind The Celestine Prophecy, it does make a good adventure story when Redfield isn't trying to teach you a lesson). The problem is that Kovan can obviously write, and he's obviously got a message to tell, but no one bothered to hammer McLuhan's old truism into his head. Just having a message to impart is not enough; if the story doesn't tell the message, what you end up with is usually unreadable dreck. (A lesson many authors could stand to learn, not just Kovan; he just happens to be my particular target at this moment.) Kovan comes up with a decent, albeit vastly overused, setting, and some intriguing characters, but then plops said characters down in said setting and gets to teachin' without so much as a Celestinesque adventure. So despite Kovan's insistence that what's here is a novel (and despite the bits outside the novel where Kovan explains his reasons for writing the book-- which may be the furthest reaching into the fictional to be found between these covers), it reads a whole lot more like a how-to self-help book written by one of the great scammers of our age. I'm sure I don't have to name them, you all know the names, some of you have even read the books. At least Kovan as the sense not to try and pass this off as nonfiction.