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``Sharp Objects'' by Gillian Flynn; Shaye Areheart Books ($24)
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People have talked about Nero Wolfe hating women in Rex Stout's mysteries; people have even talked about such writers as Mickey Spillane hating women because they are sometimes treated as mere sex objects in those books.
But to get deep into hatred of women, it can be argued, it takes a woman to do the writing, and Gillian Flynn heaps such scorn and disgust on women in her brilliant novel "Sharp Objects" that it's like a garbage truck trying to dump a full load into a paper sack. The sack rips open and Flynn's powerful condemnations spill out all around us.
On the other hand, this powerful, mesmerizing novel grabs us in horror and makes us look hard at a bitterly difficult clash of cultures in middle America, between the supposedly genteel, matriarchal past and an invasive but illuminating modern world.
Flynn breaks through the facade of ladies who lunch to expose the rotten core of social convention and hypocrisy. No Bedford Falls, Jimmy Stewart niceties in this book; Flynn instead sounds an alarm about America's new gothic madhouse, the great Midwest.
Flynn's narrator in this serial-killer mystery is Camille Preaker, a reporter for the fourth-largest daily newspaper in Chicago, the Daily Post.
Preaker is not quite drowning in a sea of self-loathing when her editor asks her to go exactly where she doesn't want to go: her hometown of Wind Gap, Mo., where a young girl has gone missing, months after the body of another girl had been found, murdered and mutilated.
What kind of people live there?
"Old money and trash," Preaker tells her editor. Which are you? he asks. "I'm trash. From old money," she says, neatly summing up part of what has made her life hell.
Her mother, Adora, is the richest, most powerful person in Wind Gap. And she's the woman who made Preaker think of herself as trash.
As Flynn's story unfolds - as Preaker returns to the streets where she lost her virginity in a disgusting way, where she began to drink, where her own little sister died, where her own sense of self-worth was nipped in the bud - we realize how much she has accomplished just to survive and keep working at her job as a mediocre reporter at a mediocre newspaper.
Preaker is on hand as the body of the second girl is found, and she stays in town, working at digging up the story for her paper, but also digging at the scars of her own painful history, as her mother tries to stop her reporting and as the ladies who drink for lunch begin to reveal bits of truth about her childhood.
And Preaker has plenty of scars: She is a cutter, and not just a few slash marks here and there - she is the illustrated woman among cutters, with a dictionary's complement of words carved into her body everywhere but her face and the back of her neck.
"The only place you have left," Adora whispered at me. Her breath was cloying and musky, like air coming from a spring well.
"Yes."
"Someday I'll carve my name there." She shook me once, released me, then left me on the stairs with the warm remains of our liquor.
And it is not just Preaker's generation of women who are in trouble in Wind Gap, or the women who came before that - it is Preaker's little half-sister, Amma, and her girlfriends who are truly precocious in terrifying ways.
Preaker may drink some with her mother, or with the hunky big-city cop who has landed in Wind Gap for a while, but it's 13-year-old Amma, big-breasted and beautiful, a junior-high social lioness, who supplies the illegal drugs at a wild teen party.
Preaker starts this book miserable and unhappy, and goes to Wind Gap where she has to relive every tragedy of her life in stunning Technicolor detail; her survival (she is narrating, after all) is the little ray of hope that makes this book meaningful, not just horrifying.
It's as if Flynn had spun the dial on the genre-selector and it landed right on the line between "Novel" and "Mystery," and she decided to write a book that is both.
It's a stunning, powerful debut from someone who truly has something to say.
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(c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.). Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.
