October 27, 2005
By Matt Savelloni
“NEVER BE UNFAITHFUL TO A LOVER, EXCEPT WITH YOUR WIFE.” –P.J. O’Rourke
A very astute, very experienced literary agent once told me to avoid at all costs any type of coincidence in fiction. There’s a whopper of a fluke right at the denouement of DERAILED that could have sunk the entire enterprise if the novel hadn’t crashed and burned long before the big explosion. The pre-press hype around James Siegel’s debut is more baffling than anything in the novel, the twist of which any sentient mystery reader will grasp far earlier than the protagonist. In Hitchcock’s “man on the run” films, his Everyman was smart and sophisticated, in over his head, yes, but able to keep his wits and fight his way to redemption. But Charles Schine—Siegel’s protagonist—just might be the dumbest person ever to inhabit a thriller and when the audience is so much smarter than the hero, what reason is left to care?
I will try to avoid any kind of cute puns in “derailing” DERAILED. You know, those mainstream-critic moronicisms that proclaim, “DERAILED careens off the tracks into the Land Of Boredom” or “This is one ticket to ride you should definitely pass up!” Too easy, and I’m not looking for sound bites. The trouble with DERAILED is hinted at early on when Siegel plays with its narrative structure, vaulting from 1st to 3rd person for no other purpose than to trick the reader. He struggles to tell a parallel story, one that takes place after the main events of the novel, but this B-plot does not necessitate such trickery, rendering it as a simple gimmick, a vacuous, Creative Writing 101 red herring that exists only to mask the machinations of a writer desperate to please.
“CONSEQUENCES ARE UNPITYING.” – George Eliot
I will also try not to spoil any of the “surprises” of DERAILED. In a nutshell, ad-man Charles Schine is quickly losing his magic touch at the agency. Troubled by his daughter’s diabetic condition and a marriage that has lost its spark, Charles finds himself flirting with a younger beauty on the commuter rail. Soon, they are going for drinks, then dinner and… you get the picture: hotels, cabs, excuses of late-night meetings and hot, unfaithful sex. Siegel does an exemplary job of setting up Charles and Lucinda, the paramour. Cheating on a spouse is a staple of all kinds of great dramas and thrillers for a reason: it works. It compels. You will find yourself tearing through these early pages despite the fact that Siegel keeps cutting away to that annoying, anonymous 1st person narration. The plot turns when a man busts into Charles and Lucinda’s cheap hotel room, beats them severely and takes their money and Lucinda’s honor. This scene is the best in the book: harrowing, brutal and concise. It is so vivid that I was shocked when Siegel kept plotting and re-plotting, muddling a perfectly tense environment with new haphazard developments.
Again, I can’t really get into too much detail without spoiling the big reveals of the book but you will see them coming a mile away. Lucinda essentially exits the book and Charles makes choices that any Hitchcock Everyman would readily dismiss, starting with hiring a clerk with a shady past to scare the blackmailer off. Huh? Then, Charles discovers impropriety at the firm and—in a move that only a lobotomized Times Square pickpocket would elect—bribes his way in, hoping to use the money to restore what he stole from his daughter’s fund to pay Vasquez, the blackmailer. Ooookay. Charles never stops to consider—like you or I—that if he, a straight-laced executive, can uncover the obvious money laundering scheme then perhaps the firm’s controller and maybe even the police will detect it as well. At this point, Siegel has completely lost control of himself.
Charles arrives at all of his alternatives not through reasonable deduction or harried, slippery slope necessity, but simply because the plot requires it. Siegel spends so much time explaining these new plot offshoots that the characters become irrelevant and DERAILED turns into the Book That Would Not End, involving prisons, assumed identities, erroneous obituaries and cross-country flight. Whatever sympathy Charles evoked early on has evaporated, the verisimilitude and consequences of his dastardly actions abandoned. I hated Charles and everyone else in the book and was hoping peripheral characters would start pushing the main cast in front of moving trains. His wife is a simpering wet rag and the daughter and her medical condition show up only when Siegel needs more action to distract him from significant exposition. DERAILED operates on the assumption that more is more, adding on plot twist after plot twist, random event after random event when a sleek plot with deeply-rendered characters would have sufficed. By the time that giant coincidence arrives—and by giant, I mean it’s the fucking Space Shuttle of coincidences with “Deus Ex Machina” emblazoned on its side—we no longer care about any of these cardboard stand-ins for the future movie this book was written to promote.
“WHENEVER A HUSBAND AND WIFE BEGIN TO DISCUSS THEIR MARRIAGE THEY ARE GIVING EVIDENCE AT A CORONER'S INQUEST.” – H.L. Mencken
So does that mean DERAILED will make a good movie? Hardly. It needs significant overhauling. And 90% of Siegel’s unnecessary plotting must be weeded out. Even then, the major bailout must be rewritten and the conclusions reduced to one, unless they want to go the route of RETURN OF THE KING, ending the movie over and over until audiences are ready to place popcorn buckets over their heads and scream for it to stop. THE FIRM experienced a similar problem—a terrible ending—solved in virtuoso fashion by a troika of geniuses: David Rabe, Robert Towne and David Rayfiel. Audiences will not accept—nor should they—the preposterous random events that circumvent DERAILED’s climax. It’s almost as if Siegel finally realized he had painted himself into a corner and his only way out was to drop in an absurd intrusion that is nothing more than a feeble reference to our post-9/11 world. It’s a horrifying, chickenshit moment that literally had me flipping back to see if I had missed something to justify that kind of left-field arbitrariness. Sadly, I was only able to confirm that the early promise of DERAILED had been smothered to death by its creator.
Is there any hope? I suppose so. Basically, take the set up—the family, the train, the affair, the crime and the blackmail—and then make up the rest. Certainly, if anybody can pull off such rebirth, it’s Stuart Beattie, Hollywood’s thriller writer du jour, author of the Michael Mann masterpiece COLLATERAL. If Beattie can summon that level of concentrated characterization and preserve the early, hair-raising potential of DERAILED, then maybe we will see a rousing phoenix arise from the ashes.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, I keep hearing that agent warning me against coincidence and that phrase about trying to make chicken salad from—oh, well, you get the idea.
The tagline for DERAILED is, “They Never Saw It Coming.” Trust me, you will.
“No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.” – Marquis de Sade
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