The Google, with its beautiful imperfection, informs me that
anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of all new books are bought in
airports. Last week, I was in Salt Lake City International Airport
(they have one daily flight to Paris, hence:
International)
and I decided to see what air travelers are reading.
A Waldenbooks-sized store named Simply Books seemed like a decent
place to begin. By the register, a tall man was asking a middle-aged
employee for help. “I like Stephen King,” he said. “Do you have any
Stephen King books? Best book I ever read was a Stephen King book.”
Unfortunately, Tall Man had read all the Stephen Kings that Simply
Books had to offer.
“We have Water the Elephants,” the bookseller said, holding
up a copy of Sara Gruen’s embarrassingly sentimental Water for
Elephants. “That by Stephen King?” asked Tall Man. “No.” “Hm,” he
said, and stalked off. I approached the bookseller and asked for a
recommendation.
She apologized immediately by saying, “I’m not much of a
reader,” and then she handed me David Baldacci’s newest mystery.
But his books are like making love to a cardboard cutout of a
woman. She tried to get me to read Patricia Cornwell’s latest, but
Cornwell’s main character, Kay Scarpetta, became crushingly dull 12
books ago. She told me that Eric Clapton’s autobiography was selling up
a storm, but I feared it’d be like listening to a 15-hour-long
“Tears in Heaven.”
I wound up with Whitley Strieber’s 2012, a thriller based on
the ancient Mayan prophecy that the world will end in 2012. Michael
Bay’s adapting it into a movie, and the bland characters and mindless
action will no doubt translate brilliantly to Bay’s Cinema
Idiotíque. It’ll probably set off a mini-Y2K craze: Invest in
canned goods and bottled water now.
Strieber is a fifth-rate Dean Koontz, who, of course, is a
bargain-basement Stephen King, and King’s a pale shadow of Ira
Levin, who passed away November 12. Levin’s
The Stepford
Wives, Sliver,
The Boys from Brazil,
and
Rosemary’s Baby are
perfect little engines of plot.
He wrote fables of
paranoia that behaved like
airplane
thrillers, and every one was great fun to read.
Levin’s obituaries all pointed out that he’s not a prose stylist,
but that’s unfair to the man’s imagination. His direct, punchy
sentences keep characters racing to the climax in a believable, and
sometimes sadistically funny, fashion. Levin is an irreplaceable
master; for proof, look no further than the sad state of contemporary
airport fiction. 