Whistling in the Dark

I am late, late, late with this post. I finished Lesley Kagen's Whistling in the Dark several weeks ago, right before a vacation (sans laptop) and then we came home to a major power outage (so again sans laptop) and I'm just now getting around to this. The big question, as I sit down to type this, is has that time mellowed my views of this book? Perhaps, but if so it's largely because many of the details have become hazy. (Oh, the perils of not recording my thoughts immediately!)

Whistling in the Dark is the story of Sally and Troo O'Malley, whose family is about as dysfunctional as they come in small-town, 1950s Wisconsin. (I think it was Wisconsin - I must admit, that's one of those details that's grown fuzzy. But it was definitely a small town in 1959.) The family didn't start out that way, but after Sally and Troo's father died in a car accident, things tumbled out of control, and now their mother is in the hospital, their stepfather is perpetually drunk (and usually in the arms of a paramour), and their older sister is more interested in her boyfriend than her babysitting responsibilities. All of which would be bad enough, but a murderer is on the loose and Sally just knows she's next on his list. And also his identity...or it may just be her over-active imagination.

As I work my mind back over the novel, I have to acknowledge that there was nothing particularly terrible or particularly offensive about Whistling in the Dark. No, it wasn't the writing or the characters or the plot, and yet, it was all of those things. The sum of the parts was simply too much. There were too many coincidences, too many pieces that fit together just perfectly, and too many events that were simply too far out there for me to completely buy what Kagen was selling. What's more, Whistling in the Dark defies easy categorization. It's not serious fiction to make you ponder the big questions in life (think The Summer Before the War), it's not a lighthearted "beach read" a la Gwen Bristow, and it doesn't completely capture the zeitgeist in the way The Truth According to Us does. It's not bad, but it's not memorable, either.