Amidon’s ‘Security’ Probes, If Predictably

Early on in “Security,” Stephen Amidon’s most recent novel, security technician Edward Inman describes the changes in his job over the decades. “It used to be that a lock was enough to keep people calm; now paranoia dictates that every house be outfitted with cameras and sensors, wires under the floors, and reinforced panic rooms. No matter if Stoneleigh, Massachusetts is virtually crime-free—people want to know about every movement at every moment.”

Inman’s brand of security is as much about control as it is about safety. This sort of conflation serves as a good metaphor for the action in Amidon’s novel. Each inhabitant of Amidon’s sleepy college town is in the process of losing agency over his or her own life, and is desperate to regain it: Kathryn, the town’s musician-turned-music teacher, feels that she is slowly losing touch with her son Conor but doesn’t know how to help him; Walt Steckl, the town’s loitering electrician, can’t help drinking and falls into unruly lewdness when he does; Angela, a student at the local college, clings pathetically to her ever-elusive professor and lover Stuart, while he, in turn, struggles with his writing. As their lives intersect—at times in unexpected ways—the book evokes the particularly tragic chaos of suburban existence in which adults, unwilling and untethered, slowly slide away from the vision of a happy life. It’s a reluctance to surrender these individual visions that fuels the collective fascination with one another’s failures. Suburban desperation is no new project for novelists and with his riskless and stilted prose, Amidon does little to build upon the motif. Tired and clunky language encumbers the novel, and thus, like the characters within, it never achieves its modest promise.

The book opens with an alarm at Doyle Cutler’s house and, although nothing concrete has happened, it is clear that that Cutler is a man to look out for. Cutler has all the trappings of a villain—wealth, secrecy, and even a hairless cat. When the central event of the plot—Mary Steckl’s sexual assault—finally occurs midway through the book, it comes as no surprise that it should have happened at Cutler’s mansion.

Meanwhile, characters are self-consciously shaking the foundations of their lives. When Inman runs into Conor outside Cutler’s home, it gives him the opportunity to start up an affair with former girlfriend Kathryn. Angela struggles to both sustain a relationship and keep a straight face in her creative nonfiction class, where she must hide her connection to Stuart. Walt Steckl wonders how to keep his recent trip to the courtroom from his dutiful and principled daughter. Each navigates his or her daily life with a hyperawareness of the eyes of others.

After Mary’s assault, the plot picks up. The inhabitants of Stoneleigh, eager to snoop into their neighbors’ lives, jump on the case. They are desperate to establish the identity of the culprit. The flurry of action is more self-motivated than selfless—each, it seems has a secret connection to Cutler that must be sustained to preserve his or her outward image. Students and adults grab onto rumor in the hopes of establishing a palatable truth.

In one of the better sequences of the novels, Mary’s classroom writing is published against her will in the local newspaper. Recent events mold Mary’s unexceptional words into a pointed argument about parental abuse. Nonfiction—the book, in this moment, suggests—holds no more fact than fiction, especially when in the hands of someone with something to prove. As appearance takes precedence over reality, Mary’s well-being goes unnoticed in the flood of accusations and revealed secrets.

But by the time the story has opened up questions of about snooping and control, the characters have already exploited their potential for depth. Amidon’s people are flattened by the weight of his writing. “She might be twenty-one but she wasn’t born yesterday,” reads one attempt at interior monologue. Even when they finally spring into action, characters are stuck in the stiff mold Amidon has constructed with his prose. “Stuart was late for class. But he was never late for class”—Amidon often creates his tense mood with rigid contrasts. At times, the dialogue is as flavorless as cardboard, “It’s like I have been spinning my wheels,” says Inman to Kathryn. Are we really to believe that these people are as one-dimensional as Amidon makes them out to be?

As his characters hang on to whatever fact they can, Amidon himself refuses to lose control. His reliance on formula comes across more as reluctance to hazard outside of the safe bounds of cliché than lack of talent. In “Security,” Amidon demonstrates that he has a flair for plot and an eye for intrigue. If only he would just relax and let go.

—Staff writer Madeleine M. Schwartz can be reached at mschwartz@fas.harvard.edu.