Random Begrudging Book Review: Janet Evanovich, "Ten Big Ones"

First, a little backstory to explain WHY the hell I'm doing this: My step-grandfather owns a small business installing heating stoves and fireplaces throughout southwestern Montana and, increasingly, northern Wyoming. For a business that essentially just consists of nothing more than himself and his assistant, it's reasonably successful! But it would be more successful if it were more successful, so he's enlisted my mother to drive around and put up flyers on public bulletin boards, because I guess he knows nothing about advertising in the twenty-first century. And she's been making me go along to assist because, well, that's the kind of thing I have to put up with while I'm living back home. As we cross boring stretches of boring countryside on our way to the next boring small town, what does she choose to listen to? In what she claims is an attempt to share my love of mystery novels, she plops an audiobook she got from the county library into the CD player. That book? You're pretty thick if you haven't realised by this point, thanks to the subject line, that it's Janet Evanovich's "Ten Big Ones", the sort of book you could've easily found on sale in paperback alongside fresh produce and frozen dinners for years after its release. She was offended when I asked if we could shut it off, so I had to listen to the entire thing - and that takes us to where we are now. I suffered through it, and so you shall suffer vicariously!

In an awkward, fawning interview with the author appended to the end of the audiobook version, Evanovich explains that, despite the fact that one finds her books in the mystery section, she fancies her stories as closer to adventures "like Indiana Jones". That last claim is, of course, suspect, because the first three Indiana Jones films featured exciting plots and the last one featured Shia LaBeouf commanding some sort of mind control over monkeys, and needless to say, this novel features neither of those things. She's got one thing right, though - the "mystery", as it were, is one of the least mysterious mysteries ever committed to paper. (Or, in this case, polycarbonate plastic.) The story, as it were, opens with series heroine and rather implausible lady bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and her horrific black stereotype partner (more on that later) gorging themselves, as women in the Evanoverse's Trenton, New Jersey are wont to do (more on that later, too), when they witness an armed robbery in progress. It's the Red Devil, some juvenile street tough who's committed many such robberies and gotten away with it due to the brilliantly devious plan of hiding his face with a dollar store Halloween mask. Stephanie is spectacularly inept at her profession and fails to stop the guy, but not before managing to get a peek at his face. When Evanovich returns to this plotline after a few chapters of unrelated tedium, Stephanie randomly spots him whilst driving around the city, a not at all contrived plot element to be sure, and again spectacularly failing to be useful. All she accomplishes is getting a cop shot. Oh, and stupidly revealing that she recognises the guy without his mask. Like most criminals, he places "witnesses who could make a positive identification in a police lineup" in his Turn-Offs column. Worse still, it turns out the kid's a member of one of those awful juvenile delinquent street gangs everyone's talking about these days, and said street gang has called in a hitman from the West Coast, the supposedly infamous "Junk Man", to take her out. It's at this point that Evanovich has the audacity to try to convince us that the reasons behind this are dark and mysterious! Needless to say, that was a really major strategic misfire.

Since we don't see the guy for the longest time, and when we do he's still not really physically described, I can only assume that this is Junk Man.

So, yeah. It comes as no surprise when Janny Evannyvich reveals in the aforementioned interview that even she knows that her novels are grossly miscategorised. But surely there are other elements driving this novel along, right? After all, Stephanie is being pursued by one of the robot masters from Mega Man 7. Maybe this could make for a splendid novel of suspense! But that would be naïve. In fact, this is the part of the novel that first makes you really want to be politically incorrect and punch Stephanie in the face! What does she do when she learns that there's a hitman out for her blood and maybe it might be a good idea if she lies low for a while? Why, she doesn't lie low at all, of course! In fact, she lies quite high. She continues to roam Trenton, spending much time shopping and stuffing her face. And getting fat as a result. (Perhaps it's not the best time to make yourself a bigger target?) At least judging my this book, the aforementioned Evanoverse seems to revolve around eating food and getting fat from it. Around a third of Stephanie's inner monologues revolve around stuffing her face and getting chubby and dieting, like an ineptly crime-fighting Cathy. One of the FTAs who features in an uninteresting subplot committed the awful heinous crime of stealing, and eating, a truckful of Cheez Doodles. (I'm sure Wise Foods, Inc. is infinitely flattered by the association of their product with insane unflattering female stereotypes driven by their menstrual rage!) And Stephanie's kinda-sorta-partner, Lula, is really fat and disables no fewer than two attempted escapees over the course of the book by - OH MY GOD THE WACKINESS - sitting on them, and disabling them, because she's so fat. I wish I was lying when I said that. If I was lying, I'd probably try to think of something, anything less lame.

Aside from a lung-crushing tank of flab, Lula is also a number of other things, chiefly among them a fairly nasty black stereotype. When the book first introduces the character for newcomers to the series (like Jesse, though after this book I'll also be newgoing away), we learn that she's a reformed "former ho". Though she has a more dignified job now, she still opts to stuff herself into animal print spandex that's six sizes too small. I think it goes without saying that she's also sassy and chronically unable to get work done. In fact, throughout the book, one slowly gets the idea that Evanovich really just doesn't like non-whites very much at all. A number of small-time criminals pop up throughout the book to be bounty-hunted as a plot diversion, and while not all of them are minorities, all the ones that Evanovich refuses to treat sympathetically are. In the Evanoverse, it seems, white people are fundamentally decent folk who sometimes slip up and, say, do something minor, like robbing a Cheez Doodle truck. It's the other races who are always either really dumb, or really intimidatingly murderous. For what I presume to be Evanovich's typical audience of bored housewives who read a couple pages at a time, whenever they actually have the time to fit it in, I doubt it would be noticeable at all. Taking in the book all at once, it's just jarring. And while I don't think the racist undertones were a conscious decision on her part, they're certainly telling nonetheless! Even Stephanie's mentor/obnoxious kinda-sorta-love interest, a far more successful bounty hunter known as "Ranger", is moderately stereotypical. He's Cuban, so naturally, he's tall, dark, handsome, and a bit of a skeevy pervert seemingly incapable of ending sentences with any word besides "babe". I suppose I should just be thankful he's not also a beardy Communist dictator.

Which segues me nicely into the overplayed-yet-underdeveloped romantic subplots. In the aforementioned interview with the author, Evanovich relates that she actually began her writing career in the most ultra-literary genre of all: romance novels, AKA porn for ladies. One day, she decided she'd "ran out of sex positions" and moved into the woefully miscategorised mystery genre, but her interest in quote-unquote "romance" nonetheless permeates this entire novel (and presumably the series as a whole), dedicating a large percentage of the book to Stephanie and her two uninteresting "love" interests. Number one is the aforementioned Ranger, whose invaluable assistance through the book is kinda sorta outweighed by his strict rejection of monogamy maybe or maybe not? If the constant waffling in her internal monologues about him doesn't drive one crazy, her constant internal gushing about his "amazing" shower gel will. Seriously, the stuff is sexualised in a way that's uncomfortable enough for the duration of an AXE body spray commercial; for the length of an entire novel, it's just creepy. Besides, his lovely fragrance is hardly his most endearing quality - she should be extremely thankful that, y'know, he doesn't press charges or anything after she essentially breaks into his apartment in her sole attempt to escape the wrath of Junk Man's Junk Shield. Then there's the, um, "real" love interest, Detective Joe Morelli. He's white, so Evanovich thinks he's the more sympathetic of the two, even though the reality is that he's kind of a prick. Throughout the story, he's one of the only characters who actually feels like trying to protect the ostensible heroine of the story from brutally being slaughtered, but this hardly makes any difference because he's also a moron. His solution to her impending doom? She should stay at home and "be a housewife", despite the fact that they're not even close to being married. Yeah, the best way to hide from a professional hitman is to hide away in your home, where he...already knows you live. Freaking brilliant, Detective. And let's not get started on Stephanie's uninteresting sister's love interest, Albert Kloughn, who I suppose is written as a decent enough guy, but I just can't get over the way the lady who reads the audiobook version voices him as Kirk Van Houten for some reason.

And what's the reader/listener's reward for enduring a long walk through this murky rotting plot meat stew? I'm going to be a bad critic and outright spoil the ending for you, because it's...fascinatingly awkwardly awful. After the closest thing Morelli performs to detective work in the entire story (seeing as how he spends the rest of his time just being a male chauvinist douche), we learn that Junk Man has managed to take care of everyone else on his "list", like a forgotten Jason Lee sitcom character's still-evil twin, and it turns out that she's next. With that knowledge, Stephanie makes the very clever decision to go out in broad daylight regardless because, hey, aren't baby showers always worth risking one's life for? Of course, this works out badly for her. And also for Janet Evanovich herself, as one can actually feel her starting to write herself into a bottomless pit from which the only possible escape is, apparently, batshit insanity. Stephanie soon finds herself kidnapped and facing gang rape as part of Junk Man's gang initiation. (Wait, I thought he was a professional hitman and not a stereotypical inner-city youth?) But just as one starts thinking too hard about the fact that it seems like maybe this novel could've been ghostwritten by the incomparable Nancy Grace, we see that Stephanie had nothing to fear, as the entire swarm of bad guys are quickly wiped out by Stephanie's token transvestite acquaintance Salvatore "Sally" Sweet, the school bus he's allowed to drive professionally for some reason, and....oh yeah, let's give him an Uzi, too. Why not? It teaches us all the valuable lesson that all heinous crimes can be solved by indiscriminate vehicular manslaughter and conservative-friendly gun usage! Well, except for the transvestite part.

So, after being forced by some unholy cosmic force through 300+ pages of alleged drama and quasi-peril that get resolved through the almighty force of deus ex machina, one is forced to look back on their experience and try to decide if they actually enjoyed any of it at all. To be perfectly fair, Evanovich isn't an individual completely devoid of talent. A select few scenes in which she manages to get enough characters in the same room show a hint of comic sparkle, of the sort that imply she could've fit right in in the world of American sitcom writing. Is it the highest compliment in the world? No. But Evanovich would surely be better served honing the one thing she might sort of have a knack for, and casting aside the awkward rooster-teasing quasi-romance and the sensational nonsensical crime plots and sassy black Wanda-Sykes-as-a-chunky-former-prostitute sidekicks. As is, it seems her books are hardly captivating reads. Why are they so consistently popular, then, always selling well enough to find a spot beside Dean Koontz's latest and whatever James Patterson's Chinese child labourers churned out this week on your neighbourhood grocery store's Rack o' Disposable Reads? The probable answer is that there just aren't that many books for the adult set featuring badass lady protagonists who are badass because they're strong-willed, and not because they're just shameless masturbatory fodder for the mostly male crowd of nerds who will invariably buy them up. (There's nothing to be ashamed of, sexually frustrated nerd friends, I assure you.) Just about every other book in the mystery section featuring a non-masturbatory female protagonist is one of those cosy mysteries, in which she'll solve a nefarious poisoning and provide a thematically appropriate snickerdoodle recipe too, and while personally I'd rather read one of those than another Evanovich creation, undoubtedly there are some women out there who find it a bit...pandering. Janet Evanovich succeeds because Stephanie Plum is still about as close as mainstream novels get to a strong, relatable female protagonist, but that's more of a slight to the folks churning out books in this day and age than a compliment to her, because Stephanie's a not terribly flattering self-conscious boy-crazy waffler who seems to cause more trouble than good in her attempt to partake in a male-dominated profession. Is this somehow inspiring? I submit that it is not!

So, all in all, I can't say that it made for a very pleasant car ride. I went into this with the mindset that, even if it's a lousy book, it's preferable to listening to whatever Top 40 radio claptrap she'd typically listen to, with things like Maroon 5 and their weird pronunciation of the word "bed" with a long A. Coming out of it, I realise that a bad song is over in three minutes, but audiobooks waste entire hours of your valuable lifetime. To the sadly increasingly smaller number of people out there who still read books, I say: Put some actual consideration in what you're committing to read (or committing to having someone else read to you), because life's too short for a aimlessly mediocre leisurely stroll through the seas of weight obsession with an ultimate destination of nothingness. "Awful" and "amusingly awful" are entirely different things, after all.