SET in a self-conscious Massachussets college town, Security revolves around a group of disparate characters affected by the sexual assault of a young woman at the home of a local millionaire.
Ed Inman, owner of Stoneleigh Sentinel home security, serves as the hero of this rather sluggish moral drama. At the outset, Ed, an agreeable insomniac struggling with an imploding marriage and a sense of life’s pointlessness, discovers the inebriated son of his ex-girlfriend shambling down a back road, just after an alarm has sounded at the house of rich recluse Doyle Cutler. So far so good – but the problem is it’s another 150 pages before we return to that scene, which is at the centre of the novel.
Meanwhile Amidon takes us on a circuitous tour of the crumbling, melodramatic relationships in the fictional town of Stoneleigh.
It’s a story riddled with laptops, paranoia-inducing home surveillance systems, CCTV cameras and GPS devices. Amidon takes a tad too long to get to where he’s going.
Security is a central focus in this novel – Stoneleigh is the kind of town where it’s illegal to sit, squat or lie in any public byway for more than 10 minutes. The penalty for non-compliance could be 30 days in the county jail and a fine of up to $1,000.
However, Inman’s meeting with Conor Williams proves to be a fateful one, as is his decision to take the 19-year-old home to his mother. It provides Inman with the opportunity to examine one of the roads not taken in his life – and catapults him into the drama surrounding the assault.
Amidon is not a flamboyant writer; his prose is unobtrusive and his storyline deceptively simple. Yet his determined and skilful probing beneath the comfortable veneer of his characters’ lives provides genuinely absorbing insight into their outwardly humdrum existences.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, August 21, 2010
