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The novel, not the movie, A Simple Plan is an excellent debut novel by Scott Smith. I read his later book, The Ruins, and it paled in comparison to this one. A Simple Plan is ambitious in its plot making inspired by what I can only compare to Shakespeare's Macbeth. And with that being said, I can easily see how some folks might see this book suffering from a certain moral didacticism which is shallow and unwieldy. Scott Smith is not Shakespeare and I don't think he pretends to be. His writing is aggressively active using simple sentences, compound complex ones, and never fails to use ones with too much punctuation.
He doesn't try the pretenses of writing you see in books. For example, Gone Girl is a book I've never been able to finish. It has the unnecessary details that scream look at me I'm writing and I'm trying to be great. Just write, and tell your story. It's one of the things I appreciate from Smith. Again, he's not Shakespeare, nor does he pretend to be.
If I hadn't read his book, The Ruins before this I wouldn't understand his honesty. He creates characters operate from a moral didacticism just like Macbeth, except Smith doesn't drag this out, probably because today's audience wouldn't read it. Further, these are characters we can relate to from the time we live in and the situation is one we can all see: What would we do if we found four million in cash? verses What would you do to be king? How many people would you kill to keep your money?
The protagonist, in this story starts out with a simple plan: keep the money and then everything spirals out of control from there, his choices and those of the two men in the agreement with him do as well. Smith pounds you with plot twist keeping you guessing until the surprising end. He does a great job of developing his characters to the extend to gain my sympathy, and then makes me hate them. This is a skill to twist a reader's feelings to such an extreme. One particular character found his way into my heart, because he was the only one who dreamed small, loved and trusted despite the betrayal. I'll reveal one of the plot twists should I say more, so I'll stop here. Please read this book, it was published years ago, but it still wakes up the bad in us all makes us question our own moral dilemmas and definitely makes me trade in my coffee for veggie juice.
I'm back and forth on "writing" for the sake of flourish. There are people who I do adore for their prose, but often, their books aren't necessarily all that plot intensive, so the "screaming prose" as it were doesn't bother me as much.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I do have a tendency to look at a lot of books and let the ghost of Elmore Leonard whisper in my ear, "Unnecessary."