The Danger of Evil

What’s Michael Tolkin up to? We begin his latest novel, “Under Radar,” expecting another black comedy like his best-known work, “The Player”--a cynical exploration of guilt or its absence among the rich and powerful. “Under Radar” conforms to this pattern at first, then turns into something quite different: a fable of spiritual redemption.

If we’d been paying attention, though, we might have spotted a hint of this sort of thing in Robert Altman’s movie version of “The Player,” for which Tolkin wrote the screenplay. The antihero, Hollywood studio executive Griffin Mill, kills a writer and seduces the girlfriend. He not only gets away with it but (subject to a little blackmail) lives happily ever after. He escapes into the anti-reality, the Hollywood ending, that almost always trumps real life on the screen.

In “Under Radar,” Tolkin takes this notion several steps further. Tom Levy, a lawyer who enriched himself in a fake-accident scam to defraud insurance companies, kills a man while on vacation with his wife and daughters in Jamaica. He is arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Behind bars, he hears, from a convict about to be hanged, a story so powerful that it turns his hair white and shocks him into a walking coma that lasts seven years. When he awakens, he’s transformed--an honest man.

This is magic, of course, not psychology. And it’s at the heart of the novel--not just a final note of irony, followed by the credits. So it comes as a jolt, and Tolkin isn’t comfortable enough yet in the territory of affirmation to bring it off smoothly. He’s still at his best as a cold, sardonic observer of hypocrisy and sleaze.

In the beginning, Levy, who has banked the proceeds of the scam and leads an outwardly normal life, tells himself that his secret adds piquancy to existence: “[T]he knowledge of an unpunished crime grinds a lens through which the world looks small and more easily managed.”

Other people look small, too. Levy suspects that many have similar secrets, and that those who don’t are dull and unadventurous. He feels stifled at family-friendly resorts and distant from his wife; he has imaginary affairs with women he meets, each a “dense unwritten novel of travel, secret meetings, murder, punishment, and passionate enlightenment.” Such a novel, in fact, is what Tolkin writes for him. In Jamaica, he lusts after a woman, Debra Seckler, whose husband encourages Levy’s 4-year-old daughter, Alma, to dance lewdly at a reggae party. Levy’s awareness of his own corruption leads him to overreact: He fears that Alma has been emotionally damaged for life. Levy’s dark side, hitherto “under radar,” far from being confined to a single illegal act years ago, moves him to violence: He pushes Seckler’s husband off a cliff.

This is all persuasive, though the action has an odd, accelerated quality to it, as if we were reading a film treatment rather than a novel. Tolkin’s dialogue is OK in brief exchanges but stilted when characters speak at length. His descriptions, given the exotic settings, are sparse--a sign of Levy’s obsessive, peephole-like vision, perhaps, but the awkward prose doesn’t help.

Once Levy is imprisoned, however, his wife divorces him and his children are told he’s dead, and “Under Radar” abandons any pretense at realism. We enter a world of prophecies and witches and wild coincidences, in which Levy is led to conclude: “I never understood the danger of evil until now.”

The hanged man’s story, which Levy can’t remember hearing but which pours from him under prompting by his fellow prisoners, is a fable within a fable, about a missionary to Jamaica whose efforts are subverted by an American woman who tempts his congregation with pagan orgies. It’s a subtle and interesting story, but we’re left unsure why it affected Levy so powerfully, or why, for the convicts, it’s the key to their liberation.

Once free, the physically altered Levy hopes to reenter his family’s life without revealing his identity or causing more pain. To accomplish this worthy goal--another irony--Levy has to call on his old skills as a scam artist. It’s the real world’s revenge on the Hollywood ending.