"Obedience"
By Will Lavender
Two signs that Winchester University is bit stranger than the average Midwestern college: At least one student is perpetually reading "City of Glass," Paul Auster's exercise in metaphysical noir, and the campus sports a statue of Stanley Milgram, who conducted that famous experiment demonstrating the average individual's willingness to subject others to painful electric shocks if ordered to do so by an authority figure. Like every college, Winchester has its share of creepily intense student-professor dynamics, whether played out as illicit affairs, harassment complaints or the formation of fanatical cliques of intellectual followers. But at this school, the fervor is ratcheted up a few more notches.
In "Obedience," Will Lavender's suspense novel set at the fictional Winchester University, the professor in question is charismatic, mysterious and rather scary. His name is Leonard Williams (or is it?) and he teaches a course called Logic and Reasoning 204, in which the sole assignment is to solve a mystery. "There's been a murder," he announces on the first day of class, or rather "a murder that may happen in the future." A teenage girl is missing. Who took her, and why? He gives his class a few shreds of evidence. That night, the students receive cryptic e-mails containing possibly staged photographs. Attempts to track down more information about the pictures result in reprimands from shadowy campus officials. Three of the students -- a big man on campus, the studious girlfriend he dumped the year before and an emotionally fragile boy mourning his brother's suicide -- begin to wonder just how "hypothetical" professor Williams' little thought experiment really is.
It must be said that "Obedience" is not one of those intricate, Swiss-clock thrillers in which every piece of the plot clicks smoothly into place and it all adds up perfectly in the end. While it may not be as enigmatic as Auster's novels or David Lynch's films, it shares their preference for atmospheric menace over strict logic. Halfway through, you may find yourself wondering how Lavender can possibly account for every twist in this metastasizing collection of ominous developments; he can't ... or at least, not entirely. But all of the elements are so striking -- especially the recurring figure of a disturbing girl who keeps turning her head away, hiding her face -- that you're tempted to just go with it, and you should succumb to that temptation.
This is the sort of story in which a character, while retrieving her sweater from a cloakroom, is slipped a note reading, "None of this is real. I AM NOT HIS WIFE." A library's copy of a true crime book is revealed to contain nothing but blank pages. A roadside lounge, replete with weather-beaten poker players and a chatty bartender on one afternoon, is, when visited the next day, completely emptied of people and furniture. Plausible? Perhaps not. But "Obedience" is nevertheless a full course-load of sinister fun. -- LM
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