22 Jun 2011 04:56:54
Ron Hansen tackles the real-life affair, conviction and execution of bottle-blonde knockout Ruth Snyder and traveling brassiere salesman Judd Gray in his new novel, "A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion."
It was a gossip-soaked spectacle that not only appealed to our most prurient interests, but also was one of those events that helps define us. The story of these impossibly beautiful yet thoroughly damaged players was in a sense the blueprint for today's tabloid reality.
Seems like promising fodder for a historical novel, especially in the hands of a talented writer. Check out Hansen's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" for an example of how to completely inhabit an era and its notorious figures.
So it comes as some surprise that "Guilty Passion" falls flat. Maybe it shouldn't, though. In the post-O.J. Simpson era of Lindsay Lohan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner, the details of the steamy affair between Ruth and Judd seem rather quaint, and when piled together in the corner come off more sad than salacious.
By exhaustively researching the thriving newspaper scene of the day and reading books by the key players, Hansen reconstructs 1920s New York, perhaps the height of the good times in the 20th century. Things are changing and growing fast, social mores have never been under heavier attack and Prohibition has helped to create a subversively permissive atmosphere for those who get the naughty shivers from rising hemlines and illegal hooch.
It seems like everyone is having an affair — and that includes Ruth's husband, the stuffy twit too dumb to see the good fortune he has right there in the twin bed next to his. Instead, he pines over an old flame whose picture he hangs on the wall of their bedroom and, Ruth says, he is playing the field. He's rude to her in public, dismissive of her in person and at his worst — she says with an unconvincing pout — quick to rough her up when so inclined.
This boring life is just too much to bear and she begins to hint, then insist, that Judd do something about her husband so they can be together forever. Hansen paints him as a sexual slave unable to resist. That he's married with a daughter doesn't seem to matter. That she's clearly carrying on with a number of other men doesn't either.
Hansen does a nice job of blocking the scenes and filling them with the kind of details that make his books such a pleasure to read. But what he fails to provide are those key moments of insight that have made his novels so powerful.
