Book Review
By Derryll White
Sandford, John (2011). Shock Wave.
I went into the Cranbrook Public Library to do some work, and immediately spotted this new Virgil Flowers novel on the Recent Acquisitions shelf. Currently I have three novels going, reading them and switching off, but I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed it on a ‘Seven Day Loan’.
John Sandford’s “Flowers” books read fast, with lots of humour and the repeated sobriquet “That Fucking Flowers” popping up at the most opportune times. I did the only reasonable thing, I started to read the novel immediately.
Sandford examines one of the ongoing problems of our time in this novel – the ascendance of the big box retail outlets. He looks at the graft that makes the initial zoning possible, the accruing impacts on existing small businesses and the environmental impacts.
In some ways it is a shallow story, not too complex. But the strongest buttress of the book is just that, the commonality of big business rolling over local concerns, of small-town ordinary people being enveloped in greed, of relationships being torn apart.
It is an enjoyable read. Sandford’s grasp of language is excellent, his sense of Minnesota is well-tuned, and he makes the highly readable story enjoyable, and in some instances, thought-provoking. Mind candy maybe, but I will certainly look for the next Virgil Flowers novel and read it with gusto as well.
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Excerpts from the novel:
MINNESOTA – Straight north it was corn, beans and alfalfa, and after that, more corn, beans and alfalfa. Somebody once claimed to have spotted a cow, but that had never been confirmed.
SENSE OF SELF – On the way out, he thought, with his last look, that the house looked lonely; too quiet, with dust motes floating in the sunlight over the kitchen sink. Nothing to disturb them. He needed …. what? A wife? Kids? More insurance policies? Maybe a dog?
SEX – “Are your eyes green or brown?” Virgil asked. “Depends on my body temperature,” she said. “As I get hotter, they turn greener.”
BOOKSTORES – Beth Robertson was one of those bookstore women who wore her hair in a bun, who was a little overweight, but not too, who dressed in shades of brown but referred to them as earth colors, and who always tried to sell you an Annie Dillard when you were looking for a Stephen King.
ECONOMY – “No actual money moved – no currency, no dollar bills – but potential money moved.”
“You can’t see potential money,” Virgil said.
“But it’s real,” Pye said, shaking a fat finger at him. “It’s the thing that drives this whole country. People think about money and how to get it. There are people out there who break their hearts over money.”
MONEY – The shrinks talk about sex, and the cops talk about drugs, and liberals talk about fundamentalist religion, and the right-wingers talk about creeping socialism, but what people think of, most of the time, is money.
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE – Virgil knew some of that – and would get the rest out of Google – because he had, at one time or another, been in and out of most of the county seats in the state, also because he’d played Legion ball against the Butternut Woodpeckers, more commonly referred to, outside Butternut, and sometimes inside, as the wooden peckers.
CAPITALISM – Ahlquist nodded. “It is. See, Virgil, you know about these big-box stores all over the place. You get a bunch of them in a small town, and it can wreck the place. Drive out half the merchants, and their families, who always made decent livings, and the downtown dies. In exchange you get a bunch of minimum-wage jobs.
ENVIRONMENT – I’ll tell you what, this river is one of the western outposts of the trout in Minnesota. Everything south and west of here is too warm and too muddy. Too many farms, too much plowing, too much fertilizer. There’s a river fifteen miles south of here. In the middle of the summer it gets an algae bloom you could almost walk across, from the fertilizer runoff.
AGE – And time kept passing. He was hardly aware of it, the days passing so quickly and seamlessly; every time he turned around, it seemed like he was shaving in the morning to go out and waste another day of his life. He felt like he was in his twenties, still a young guy, on the move, with a great future – but somehow, nearly twenty years had slipped away. He was nearly as old as that fool, the president.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
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