The Big Picture
Douglas Kennedy
There are utterly gripping novels that you just can't put down.
There are repugnant books that you want to hurl across the room.
The Big Picture, confoundingly, is both.
As structurally irresistible as it is morally repulsive, Douglas Kennedy's debut plays havoc with a reader's sensibilities. The book's opening section is a louche suburban grotesque in which we meet one-time would-be bohemians, Ben and Beth Bradford of New Croydon, Connecticut.
Ben, the narrator, now a Manhattan lawyer, casually refers to his collection of 1,200 compact discs "all stored in a seven-foot-high revolving carousel of solid American cherry," his impressive home gym and his "$79,000 Christmas bonus." Beth, who employs both a housecleaner and a nanny, has recently spent a sizable fortune filling the Bradford manse with colonial antiques. There's an infant son, Josh, and a four-year-old, Adam, neither of whom whine nearly as much as their parents.
Ben, you see, is a photographer manque and Beth is a failed novelist. Feeling somehow trapped by their over-the-top lifestyle, Beth no longer writes and Ben—rather than shoot photos—builds a $45,000 collection of cameras he doesn't use. They treat each other miserably, too. In a cruel bit of subconscious knife-twisting, Beth is having an affair with a neighbor, Gary Jennings, who happens to be a photographer himself.
Just when the reader is ready to toss the book and tell the Bradfords to get a grip on their values, Ben transcends mere pathetic yuppie scumdom and does something truly evil. He kills Gary Jennings. And sets a crackerjack plot in gear.
In the meticulous details of the novel's mid-section, author Kennedy creates a virtual escape artist's handbook. He also fastidiously avoids the big moral picture, sticking, instead, to tight focus. The reader is seduced by the elaborate machinations as Ben shrewdly covers up his crime, fakes his death and appropriates Gary Jennings' identity. Not only does a once-reviled man get away with murder, he steals the unsuspecting reader's empathy in the process.
After settling in Montana as "Gary Jennings," Ben ironically launches a successful photography career. He's remarkably free of angst given these ironic circumstances and blithely lies his way into a love affair with Anne Ames, the photo editor of Mountain Falls, Montana newspaper. Ultimately learning about Ben's hidden secrets, Anne behaves much like readers of this book: despite pangs of moral discomfort, she's unable to resist the charms of this man.
Author Kennedy, a 38-year-old American expatriate who has lived in England and Ireland for over a decade, is clearly intrigued by the stateside obsession with mid-life disatisfactions and identity crises. This fascination, however, yields no clear resolution. In the story of Ben Bradford, Kennedy offers a conflicted portrait of this phenomenon. On the one hand, Ben's westward flight is in a great American tradition of pioneering self-determination - it leads him to the creative life he has always dreamed of. On the other hand, the fulfillment of this dream comes fraught with ethical dilemmas.
As The Big Picture corkscrews to its surprising conclusion, one is torn over what to wish for. Like a photographer in a darkroom, shrewdly tinkering with his work as it develops, Kennedy takes moral situations that should be stark black-and-white and manipulates them into haunting shades of grey.
