Bad Desire

Gary Devon

Just over halfway through Gary Devon’s second novel, Bad Desire, there is a scene so seductive, so descriptive and well-paced, that despite my reading this in a year that’s only two months old and already notable for the number of strong novels I’ve read, that this particular scene will likely stand out in my mind at the end of the year as the best single piece of writing I’ve come across.

While the rest of the novel isn’t quite up to those standards, there’s no reason to mark Devon points off. You can’t write a whole novel like that, unless you’re Wendy Walker or Cormac McCarthy (and if you do, you can count your fans on two hands, and maybe a foot). The other four hundred odd pages in Bad Desire are a tad inconsistent, but for the most part, it sticks together nicely and moves along in ways the average reader hasn’t seen before. After a slightly off beginning (the first forty pages could probably have been condensed into ten without a problem), this sucker picks up and gets rolling. And oh, how it rolls.

The story centers on the small California town of Rio del Palmos. Its fortysomething mayor, Henry Lee Slater, has got it bad for seventeen-year-old Sheila Bonner. He’s ready to dump his eighteen-year marriage and spill his guts to her, convince her to run off to some tropical location and be his kept woman. He’s about ninety-eight percent sure she feels the same way. Problem is, she’s got a very nosy grandmother, a very protective boyfriend, and, well, there’s the wife to consider, right? Throw in the smartest and wiliest police chief you’re likely to find in any American detective novel written in the twentieth century, and Henry has himself one heck of a problem.

Bad Desire comes dangerously close to being a five-star novel simply on the basis of its premise. Devon has crafted a four-hundred-fifty page excoriation of the social structures of marriage and statutory rape, and he allows the reader absolutely no way out--unlike most knee-jerk "nineteen year olds dating seventeen year olds are child molesters" books of both the fictional and non-fictional varieties, Devon goes at the subject with a clear head, offers us a female lead who is a very willing participant in the events around her, and dangles the bait in front of the reader, knowing that there’s no way that reader’s not going to bite. It is only the zealot or the choir who comes away from Devon’s preaching still feeling the same way about "child molestation." There are not enough words in the English language, and certainly not enough allowed in a simple book review, to underscore the importance of the message that lies at the heart of Bad Desire.

(I’ve been sitting here revising paragraph four over and over again; each time I do, I raise the book another notch. Go figure.) It takes a while to sink in, but Devon really did craft himself a fine morality play here about American sexual mores and how they drive those unwilling to live within them to various kinds of madness. By the end of the book, you don’t very much like anyone who’s left alive, but you understand them. Long before that, you realize you’re reading a tragedy of manners in the classic mold, and you prepare yourself for the spiral. Devon doesn’t let go quite so easily, though, and throws in a few twists (some we’ve seen before, some we haven’t) on the way down.

It’s hard to call such a book "satisfying." "Complete" is a much better term, in this case.