July 07, 2022

Complex story filled with struggling characters

Complex characters scarred by trauma and a complex plot structure that seamlessly flows from present to past and back again make Charles Forrest Jones’s debut novel, “The Illusion of Simple,” a nuanced and intriguing masterpiece.

A group of girls finds a severed hand in a creek bed in rural western Kansas. Sheriff Billy Spire’s investigation uncovers right-wing extremism and government corruption. Spire’s painful past and the lessons he’s learned from it and from those that saved him lead him to see that things are far from
simple.

Spire, from a dirt poor and abusive family, was sold by his parents to a benevolent banker and his wife for the price of a repossessed station wagon when Billy was in high school. Muscular, tough, and violent, he joins the military and serves for 20 years as an MP. On the advice of his foster father, he goes home to Kansas to run for sheriff. He learns to temper his violence and that “the first pulse to take is your own.”

His foster brother inherits the bank, wins a seat in the state senate, and continues his father’s legacy of working for the benefit of his hometown, never letting ethics or honesty get in his way. He is smart, shrewd, kind to his wife, and tender with his mistress.

Even the town ne’er-do-well, who is the victim Russ Haycock, is complex. He, like the sheriff, grows up poor in a large, dysfunctional family. He joins the army and returns with a Vietnamese wife. He is drawn to the racist conspiracy-theory-loving Posse Comitatus although his own wife is Asian. Violent by nature, Haycock is tender and possessive with his wife.

The harsh western Kansas setting of dying towns, racial conflicts, and corrupt officials makes survival a strong motivator for all of the characters. They do their best with the little they have, in terms of wealth, opportunity, and emotional security.

“The Illusion of Simple” presents readers with intimately drawn characters struggling with complex situations and conflicts. Nothing in the novel is simple but everything in it is real. The story is difficult to watch but impossible to look away from.

 

Verghese's long-awaited second novel is impossible not to love

  Abraham Verghese’s new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” is epic and engrossing. This is the book that fans of “Cutting for Stone” have been...