The Weatherman
by Steve Thayer
Anything but predictable, The Weatherman hurtles its way through gusts of melodrama, downpours of police procedural, squalls of satire and gales of Vietnam combat. Steve Thayer's second novel—following the gangster period-piece, St. Mudd—crashes daringly along, like some unholy ark in a maelstrom, the captain having coralled on board a representative sample of every sort of story he'd someday like to write.
Its a foamy and furious few hundred pages, packed with often-exhilerating prose; intriguing, three-dimensional characters; and colorfully twisted incident. Ultimately, the storm subsides, the battered craft lists and leaks, and the reader is left alone at sea. Those who came to The Weatherman expecting a pulse-pounding commercial thriller will feel adrift and dissappointed. Those whose tastes run toward more eliptical fare along the lines of Paul Auster's fiction and David Lynch's films will find Thayer's work deliciously discomfitting.
The Weatherman is genuinely admirable in its ambition. The five year saga centers around the employees of a Minneapolis TV newsroom and the search for a Twin Cities serial killer. Gee, Mary Tyler Moore meets Hannibal Lecter, huh? Not a chance. Thayer layers and interlaces the genres that inspire him to come up with plot and personality developments that are not only original, but also ring true.
One protagonist, news producer Rick Beanblossom, a Pulitzer-winning former newspaperman and facially disfigured Vietnam vet, seems completely absorbed in following the serial killer case during The Weatherman's second half. Then, one evening he falls asleep and has a dream in which the solution to another mysterious, unrelated crime—mentioned briefly much earlier in the book—suddenly pops into his mind.
This apt demonstration of the subconscious' elusive ways is altogether believable. But it also is a telltale sign to readers who are approaching The Weatherman as a whodunit underpinned with logic: This book does not follow a pattern. Do not try to outguess it.
Which is not to say that the author is always a clever plot-twist ahead of the reader. Rather, Thayer infuses his often thriller-styled text with an overall sense of ambiguity and illogic that have more to do with real life than popular mystery books. Finish reading a mystery, and you're left with a sense of order. Finish The Weatherman and chaos reigns.
The novel's two opening scenes are the brutal murder of a young woman in a parking garage and a thrillingly rendered freak tornado that wreaks havoc in the Minneapolis suburbs. During the tornado sequence, Thayer also introduces the book's second protagonist, moody meteorologist Dixon Graham Bell, who later is sentenced to death for the killing and a subsequent series of murders.
Thayer tweaks our desire to make overly neat narrative links between the bad weather and a bad weatherman, even hinting that the killer shares Bell's keen forecasting talents. But this is just the beginning, and as the novel progresses, Thayer constantly prods us to reconsider Bell's innocence or guilt, but never provides us with hard evidence either way.
In order to keep us moving along without generating any clear-cut clues, Thayer piles on bizarre subplots, including a home-made porno scam operating out of the Channel 7 newsroom, flashbacks to Rick and Dixon's harrowing days in Vietnam and a lusty affair between would-be anchorwoman Andrea Labore and Per Ellefson, Minnesota's family man governor, that ends up in a secret abortion.
As the book begins, Thayer paints Labore as a glamour-hungry airhead, but he allows her to grow into a substantial and serious character. He manages a difficult blend of satire and pathos as he shows an emotionally Labore crashing in her disheveled, deluxe apartment—"a fluffy pigpen"—and trying to zone out—"She poured brandy into a diet Coke and zapped it in the microwave."
There are no cardboard cut-outs in The Weatherman. Even minor characters like a prison janitor and an old time newsman who appear in very few scenes are given real depth. Readers may find themselves wishing the author would stop shedding new light and revealing new facets of his cast; it makes things perplexingly complicated.
Another of Thayer's teasingly related turns-of-events, occurs after Labore's abortion. Governor Ellefson makes a surprising about-face in his view of the death penalty. Previously against capital punishment, the governor changes his mind unexpectedly, passing a new death penalty law. First in line on death row: none other than Dixon Graham Bell.
One cannot fairly advise The Weatherman's potential reader that nothing in the book is as it seems. In fact, nothing in the book does anything but seem. It is left to the individual reader to decide what—if anything—all the ambiguity has actually meant. Here is an often gruesome mystery without the relief of a traditional solution. Begin to read The Weatherman and bring on your own deluge.
