Walter Falls

Rating:
Summary: Man against himself
Review: In his debut novel, Steven Gillis tackles the tortured existence of a jealous man. Financial advisor Walter Brimm suspects his wife Gee of having an affair with Tod, the editor of a progressive press. Walter hatches a scheme to not only topple his rival, but to improve his own standing with his wife. The trouble is, Walter doesn't have the stomach to execute his plan without remorse, as much as he feels driven to complete it. Single-minded in his jealousy and plagued by guilt, Walter finds himself at the mercy of his own choices as he pushes relentlessly forward. Largely told in Walter's voice (see note in next paragraph), WALTER FALLS is a classic story of man against himself.

Gillis's characterizations are generally solid and believable, with the principals Walter, Gee, and Tod fully drawn. Lesser characters, even those pivotal in the plot, are less distinctive, even forgettable, which lessens the impact of the ending. However, the main flaws of this otherwise smoothly written novel are an overabundance of mundane details regarding Walter's plot/career and a jarring point of view change more than halfway through the novel. This last is particularly troublesome, as the reader has become comfortable with Walter's voice as narrator. This late switch to the perspectives of multiple characters seriously inhibits the pacing and the drive of the story, especially since the first two characters in this section are completely new. The reader, already immersed in Walter's story, must scramble to determine who these characters are and why they are important. Yes, it's interesting to hear briefly from Gee, but not with only forty pages to go. As a result of the switch, Walter's voice, interspersed with the others, becomes lost and weak.

Despite its flaws, WALTER FALLS shows remarkable promise. The smooth writing, confident characterizations, and mature sensibility mark the arrival of a literary talent. Steven Gillis is a novelist to watch.

Rating:
Summary: Walter is victimized by more than the shadows of his doubts
Review: Irony is the master trope of the universe, a fact which Walter Brimm must understand in the marrow of his bones by the end of his descent in "Walter Falls." Walter also has a flair for understatement, amply evidenced by the first sentence of this novel by Steven Gillis that declares, "I screw things up sometimes." Walter, a financial advisor, is married to the lovely Geni, a sociology professor. They met in front of Joan Miro's "The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Couple in Love," became lovers, and eventually agreed that a prolonged commitment was in order. But while their marriage has produced a daughter, there is a fatal lack of understanding between Walter and Gee that has tragic consequences.

The catalyst for Walter's fall is the friendship between Gee and Tod Marcum, owner and editor of the "Kerrytown Review" and clearly a kindred spirit for Walter's wife. When Gee spends more and more time with Tod, supposedly working on various projects, while singing his praises at every opportunity, Walter leaps to the obvious conclusion, with his readers right behind him. So when Gee urges Walter to provide some financial advice for Tod, we are not surprised that Walter succumbs to the devil on his shoulder and sets up a plot to ruin his nemesis. However, we are surprised to learn that on a deeper level this actually goes against Walter's grain.

The idea that this story is about Walter's "fall" involves more than just the first part of the novel in which his marriage and career implode. There is also his befuddled search for redemption that provides us with even deeper insights to Walter's true nature and some realizations that are disconcerting to him even if they are not necessarily so to us. But it is clear from early on in this novel that Walter has lost himself and the question is not so much whether or not he will find himself again, but what there is to find.

Ultimately the question is whether Walter Brimm is a man more sinned against than sinning; not that there is an easy answer to such a line of inquiry. The problematic character here is Gee, who displays the sort of passive aggressiveness towards destroying her marriage that I have often seem employed in the real world. When Walter suddenly summons up the courage to confront her on his worst fears, she basically seals the fate of all of the characters in "Walter Falls" by her response. I should mention that I detest passive aggressiveness as a style of resolving conflicts, because when we discover the flaw in Walter's reasoning I immediately jumped on the mitigating circumstances to keep my initial judgment intact. After all, I find sins of omission to be more reprehensible than sins of commission.

"Walter Falls" is categorized as, in order, Middle aged men-Fiction, Failure (Psychology)-Fiction, and Midlife crisis-Fiction, which I find an interesting trio of descriptions. But since I consider midlife crises to be, by definition, of internal origin, I find that appellation to be off base, with similar reasoning for dismissing the first. This leaves the psychological dimension of the novel, although that only becomes clear in retrospect. This is the first novel by Steven Gillis and it will certainly be interesting to see where he goes next because his second book will suggest some additional insights into this story, even if it is not his intention.

Rating:
Summary: On being the master of my fate, the captain of my soul
Review: WALTER FALLS is one fine read! Steven Gillis makes his first novel a major entry into the echelon of new and very important writers. From the clever title to the closing sentence this most contemporary exposition of man's accepting responsibility for his actions, making choices, learning for mistakes and fighting for that final thread of recovering his soul Gillis has given us a character in Walter Brimm that is bound to become as indelible an icon as Daedalus, Caulfield, and Lomann.

Walter Brimm is an ordinary man, a mid-thirties investment broker who manages to hit on peripheral information enough times to become part of an important powerful firm. He is deeply in love with his wife Gee, a university professor who has grown to the point in a stale marriage where she supplements her needs by writing for a literary magazine conceived and pitifully mismanaged by idealistic Tod. Walter senses Gee's involvement with Tod to be more than comraderie and therein lies the thorn in his side that ignites the inception of his fall. Normally a man of satisfactory ethics, his jealousy re his wife's increasing distance pushes him toward a 'contract with the devil' in the person of Jack Gorne. Gorne as his nemesis states "Right and wrong are just words. They're arbitrary abstractions at best. The only ligitimate definition for what's fitting is that which gets us what we want." And here begins Walter's covert 'friendly' professional guidance for Tod's monetary management of his magazine: through recommendations and wiles (superbly and scrupulously detailed by author Gillis in a way that even those uninitiated into the money market world can understand) Walter plots the financial destruction of Tod, a plan that will reveal to Gee the inadequacies of her 'hero' and force her return to Walter.

Of course it backfires and Walter's "fall" is total: his descent into his Mephistophelean pit breaks him and he loses everything. Once release from the hospital for his mental breakdown, Walter aligns with Janus ( a physician dedicated to his patients in a free clinic) and Myrian (Janus' artist lover) and slowly rebuilds his life. Another encounter with evil in the person of Martin (a smarmy photographer and fraud investigator) drives Walter to the charging sword of making things 'right' this time, only to once again fall further - this time fully cognizant of his error and accepting responsibility for his motivations and actions. In an exquisite encounter with his 7 year old daughter who questions her father's actions, Walter expains his own life: "Sometimes men, and women, we - that is people - don't care as much about what happens to others and only react when something affects them directly" "..there are rules we have to follow. Laws of conduct. ...People get what they deserve."

In the final confrontation of Walter's Faust with Jack Gorne's Mephistopheles, Jack scolds Walter "Don't be such an innocent. There isn't a man alive who doesn't act with self interest. Your friend did preciesly what he wanted. No one was holding a gun to his head. The only diference between you and him is that he had the balls to get what he wanted without moralizing over whether or not the means justified the end."

Walter surveys his life, takes his due, and from his prison cell reflects "I think of my circumstance, and the way I came from there to here, and how in love and war, feast and famine, fair weather and foul, the distinction between one man's good fortune and another's ruin is not found in the arbitrary construct of the universe, but in the choices made day to day. This is the order found at the heart of all dense matter."

Getting to all of this illuminatingly simple philosophy and comment on 21st Century Everyman is the real pleasure of Steven Gillis' writing. He has an astounding ability to create wholly three dimensional characters, people who we are allowed to examine intensively, making them understandable for even their most subtle quirks. Walter Brimm should by all rights be a despicable person, but Gillis suffuses him with life so that for all his flaws, bad choices, misdeeds, failures, we still care deeply about this man. Gillis writes with a flowing style that never lets the eye drop or the atention stray. He is a beautiful wordsmith, a fine storyteller, and a soul of clarity and goodwill. If this is a first novel, then we can all await the next trasure bound to flow from this gifted writer's pen. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED