The Wescotts are a study in human misery. In this affluent Boston real-estate clan, all the spouses hate each other, all the siblings hate each other, and every one of them seems to hate themselves, too. But the gubernatorial election promises the opportunity to upend the status quo: if Owen becomes governor, what will happen to his marriage? Who will become CEO of the firm? And, most importantly, who will fight the dirtiest to cling to power?
Abby Reilly’s CHOICE OR CHANCE is a tight, brisk thriller. Every chapter is time-stamped, and though it’s a simple, straightforward device, seeing a literal countdown to disaster is surprisingly effective at increasing the tension. Paired with a classic Gothic turn—a violent thunderstorm is visibly approaching over the open ocean—it infuses the text with dread. In the narration itself (all told from the characters’ various perspectives), the prose deploys some tantalizingly sharp turns of phrase: lines like “Rejection always makes me thirsty” wouldn’t sound out-of-place in hard-boiled noir fiction. At a few key moments, the text is also surprisingly funny: when the eldest Wescott child, alarmed that he might not inherit his father’s business after all, insists “I earned CEO the hard way,” it’s hard not to laugh aloud.
However, CHOICE OR CHANCE has steep structural challenges to overcome in the narrative technique. The overwhelming majority of the chapters are first-person, alternating amongst the family members and some of their closest hangers-on. It’s not impossible to accomplish effectively, but there’s a real danger here: all of the characters are fundamentally unlikable, for one reason or another, and spending so much time inside their heads becomes deeply uncomfortable (especially since at least two are outright sexual predators). None of the characters has the outlandish, charismatic monstrosity of a Patrick Bateman, for instance. They’re all just normal, terrible rich people, and it’s hard to keep caring about them over the length of the novel.
The first-person narration also highlights a few of CHOICE OR CHANCE’s consistent problems: voice and tone. First-person perspective can be challenging because it’s so transparently a literary device—are we supposedly hearing a character’s thoughts? Is a character telling a story as though to an audience? Here, the narration often feels unnatural, stilted, and performative. One character describes serial philandering with the unlikely pronouncement, “Over the years, I developed a stable of titillating lovers.” Another, preparing for a tryst, observes, “The thought of him exploring my body warms up my female parts as I complete my makeup”—a sentence more likely to be said by an extraterrestrial putting on a human costume than an actual human being. The dialogue falls into the same trap: in one scene, a Boston millennial drug dealer comments on the approaching storm by saying aloud, “This nor’easter will arrive sometime tonight, rampaging through here like stampeding elephants through a corn field.” Because voice needs to be a reflection of character, these unlikely and overwritten turns of phrase have the dual effect of flattening the characters into caricature and alienating the reader from the text.
In the end, though, CHOICE OR CHANCE is about plot and atmosphere. And for fans of a family-drama thriller with political undertones, the book is sprightly and flexible enough to scratch that itch and not overstay its welcome.
Though the prose style is uneven and the perspectives are tough to stomach, Abby Reilly’s CHOICE OR CHANCE still has enough to offer a dedicated fan of the sealed-room thriller.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader