By Michael Collins
In a momentary return to his role—from what feels to him at times like a former life—as literary editor and agent, Matt Connell levels with a client, “[T]o be honest, if you want a murderer to be your protagonist, you’re asking me to do a heavy lift when it comes to revising this thing” (181). The statement resonates thematically across Mark Wish’s most recent novel, Necessary Deeds. Connell, who actually is both the narrator and a murderer, is released from prison after agreeing to serve as an undercover FBI operative helping to solve the case of a killer who targets successful writers. As the unfolding case keeps the pages turning, however, Matt’s work to end the story of the serial killer merges with his ongoing inner revision of the story in which he was a killer, understanding of the past fostering present actions that, in turn, recontextualize the past. In this way, the book reflects the many ways in which revisions of our thinking open new plots in our lives, new forms of “agency” to use one of the novel’s central puns. Wish’s positioning of Connell in the literary world allows interplay between the compositions of text and life to manifest in ways that range from empathic to comic, creating a fluid, varied, and engaging reading experience that opens deeper psychological mysteries beneath.
Matt is an “agent” in both his past and present lives and spends much of the book wondering which one—if either—holds future prospects for him. In the process, he achieves moments of critical distance from both: “For a moment I despise this about being an agent, any kind of agent: being caught between party one’s and party two’s needs with no one giving a damn about party three—yourself” (48). Such moments of insight, however, are balanced by a heightened consciousness of his need to belong, and to remain out of jail in the process, as reflected in his excitement when the FBI reestablishes contact after a pause: “They need me again, I think. They need me!” (75). The connection between Matt’s sense of agency and his literal jobs suggests the novel’s deeper interest in the overlap between our senses of self and social roles—and the instability of both.
Matt grows increasingly aware that, in his literary agent days, he was too dependent upon upholding the social appearances required to function as an agent, hiding his own talents: “I rewrote for him, but also to be clear, I essentially rewrote it from scratch—anyway, as soon as he made it big, he dumped me for an agent at ITM” (91; italics original). This expanded sense of “editing” is mirrored by an FBI agent who probably oversteps professional guidelines in her attempts to keep Matt from backsliding to similar mistakes in his love life:
“But regarding Lauren, I just wanted to say that, from my perspective—I mean, given the way I see things personally, as a, you know, woman—you should probably steer clear.” “But she and I have things to work out. As you probably heard.” “That’s what she’s leading you to believe, Matt. I’m just letting you know I think that woman is trouble. I think she was selfish back when she cheated on you […], and I think selfishness like that never goes away. I mean, she strikes me as a woman who’s so full of herself she can’t stop creating drama that ends up making her the prize.” (149)
Both examples also indicate Matt’s tendency to give away too much of himself in manipulative relationships. The complexities of going “undercover” to identify a serial killer present a complicated constellation of opportunities to work through this tendency as the novel progresses.
One such situation involves reprising his editorial work as an investigator, which results in ongoing awareness of how he interprets texts—and how he “reads” people:
The title is Blizzards, which I’m guessing he’s used because he saw Fargo. I flip to a page about three-quarters through to see if he’s mustered any suspense […]
He’s still playing with uncommon fonts, I notice.
I do my best to read with an open mind. (178-9)
The sometimes-conflicting roles deepen his reflections into both, resulting, at least temporarily, in the death of any romantic notions he had about literature: “But what good, I wonder, have all the books in the world done?” (170). Perhaps he hit rock bottom in prison, but he brought the ground with him when he left.
Matt’s doubly critical reading also mirrors the reader’s own continual “reading” of others. We do, after all, spend a lot of time sizing up others’ motivations and perspectives whether we publish them or not. One reason we are so interested in stories of all kinds is that they often teach us how to do so. Perhaps, his heightened consciousness of this broader role that “reading fiction” plays in our lives underlies both Matt’s disillusion and effectiveness. Fictional detectives back to C. Auguste Dupin nod subtly in the shadows.
Some of the book’s other instances of interpreting texts as aspects of writers’ personalities also provide much of the novel’s comic relief. The presumption that the killer is a writer allows for several quiet parodies of the Dangerous Counter-Cultural Writer:
With a glance up at Jonas, he asks, “Your crime shrink notice his failure to use punctuation?”
Jonas nods.
“And you figure this goes to Hendee’s problems with authority?” Scardina asks.
“It doesn’t suggest he plays by the rules.”
“But gentlemen,” I say. “Hendee’s a poet. A poet’s supposed to question authority.” (12)
The gesture of dramatic irony is funny if you’ve read many poems written in the last hundred years, but it also quietly complicates the character of Jonas, Matt’s main contact at the FBI. We become a little suspicious that Jonas is more educated about poetry than he’s letting on when he says things like, “Serial killers can’t help but leave clues, and this guy tends to write confessional poetry to begin with” (15). Knowing what confessional poetry means without knowing that it’s not exactly an outlier seems strange until we realize Jonas…is…himself…a poet. His concerned colleague seeks Matt’s counsel:
“A few of his colleagues at headquarters,” he says, “including Trinko, have come to me. And Trinko’s worried because he’s been…well, there’s only one way to put this, Matt, odd as it might sound: people have seen verses on scraps of paper on his desk.”
“Verses?”
“He’s writing poems, Matt.” (140)
Here, too, the novel manages to balance a humorous scene with plot development. The agent continues,
“He ordered some, Matt. He’s been buying those kinds of books for years now, sixteen all told. To me, that’s not exactly proof that he’s heavily into writing the stuff, but I’m no expert on how people become poets. So, well, that’s why I’m asking my expert in that field—you—if you’ve sensed, or you flat-out know, that in fact he has any aspirations of that sort.” (141)
In the context of the case, this actually does give Jonas’s motive—method and opportunity abound—so the FBI agents are doing their jobs, but the unusual equating of poetry and criminal behavior nonetheless sounds, you know, funny, unless you read lots of Plato.
The suspicion of Jonas is complicated by the view of the poetry world voiced by the one true poet in the novel, Hendee: “Soul schmoul, Matt. It’s time for you also to get real. It’s all about ugly polemics, man—no one gives a shit about soul. It’s about attacking and defeating and…killing, actually. And I simply can’t handle the attacks anymore. They don’t sit well with me; I don’t react very well to being hated” (49). Maybe the problem with society embodied in the killer is less that we are jealous of successful writers, more that we lack the perceptiveness to notice the soul in writing when it is there. Maybe Matt is in the process of revising his understanding of soul.
Seen in this context, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Matt has difficulties with both analysis of the queries he receives while posing as an agent and balancing his motivations in reading them:
It’s hard to separate a really bad writer from a really bad writer who might have murdered someone. And sometimes there are excellent writers who’ve created extremely violent storylines and I’m not sure whether to forward their work or not—occasionally I’m tempted to keep their queries to myself and simply represent them. (94)
The concurrent dives into the literary and criminal underworlds also present opportunities for overt comedy about recognizable clichés of local literati made more hilarious by the idea that an FBI agent is the only one taking them seriously:
The third woman walks to the stage on a cloud of pride. She announces she wants to keep the contents of her “nearly done” novel secret until it’s published. She reads ‘a series of short-shorts’ about her mother’s hands. She weeps, needs to be escorted offstage. Jonas studies her as she sits but types nothing into his phone.
Then comes the fourth woman, who might be slightly cross eyed. She speaks with an amount of fear that strikes me as wise. One word and one word only is tattooed across the back of her right hand: Revise.” (25)
Another comic moment points to revision of one’s life story—and our generally “workshoppy” conceptions of it, to use a favorite word of the undercover writer, Jonas—as a broader theme in the central plot:
But no writing sample that implies a homicidal, frustrated writer is coming my way. The closest to suspicious are chapters of novels in which women want to kill their abusive husbands but then leave them for professors of the softer sciences (sociology, psychology, and, more often than anything, anthropology) who whisk them off to Europe, where they engage in dialogue of little consequence. No tension to speak of once they meet Mr. Right. No motivation to kill. (130)
In various understated ways the criminal aspects of the novel alert the reader’s self-protective instincts while the romantic aspects pull at our wish to feel connected and be perceived in loving ways. Matt’s investigative-editorial perception of writers who do not appropriately disguise these human tendencies in their fictions is one example of the novel’s insightful reflections of practical psychology in meta-fiction.
Along these lines, the need for “plot,” recurrently a subject of Matt’s literary insight, is also quietly associated with self-reflection, grounding, and awareness, the “work” many non-writers do in the hopes of changing or deepening their life paths. Matt’s own prior intuitions of homicidal necessity, for example, were based on a dangerous concept of personal boundaries, or lack thereof:
Lauren, my ex, was who I was with pretty much twenty-four seven during my marriage, making me pretty much always happy, so when my client Blaine Davis told me, over lunch, that Lauren had taken a lover—and that this lover was my client and pal Geoff Considine—well, processing those truths all at once was clearly too much of an ask. I sensed, as I soon thereafter stormed over to Considine’s apartment in the East Village, that what I wanted to do was horrible and the sort of thing that puts even the kindest man behind bars, but something in me felt doing it was necessary more than it was wrong. I knew it was wrong, but never once during those crucial twenty-eight minutes of my life did I feel the wrongness of doing it.” (8)
However, his ability to reflect upon his past self’s instinct of necessity with a degree of objectivity, gives him a particular qualification as an investigator: “I know killers, more than a few. It will never not be true that I am one. And after all these days and nights I’ve spent on only sixty square feet of concrete, I believe I know to the core the killer I once was, and Hendee is nothing like him” (11).
His inner monologues deepen this characterization, showing revisions to interior understandings of his past and present possibilities in real time. For example, he attempts to settle his thoughts during an argument with his quasi-girlfriend, who is also a suspect, naturally:
Seriously, I keep thinking.
Seriously.
Calm down, I think.
This is Ferrari brain.
This is not really you.
This is just what happens to you.
But Ferrari brain was her idea, I think. (107; italics original)
The self-reflective movement doesn’t resolve the immediate conflict, but it does lead to a deepening awareness of his own shadow: “You’re as bad as anyone out there […]—you’re acting like a fool because you are weak, and you’re weak for the same reason anyone’s weak: because you need the money” (108; italics original).
It would be expecting too much for his moment of insight to go all the way to the bottom: People don’t become FBI agents or para-literary figures just for money; the money indicates their employment, acceptance into a culture they want to be part of for reasons both overt and usually also suspicious and concealed. Matt’s affinity for critiquing the texts through which people hope to present themselves points to a less resolvable potential of destabilization in his character, a complexity that necessitates the balancing of his incisive understanding of our “plots” with a degree of acceptance—to balance, more generally, tolerance of instability with rational, empathetic, and intuitive discernment. He learns, to a degree, to have control without being controlling.
Or does he?
As much as the novel quietly teaches us about the liminal areas that conjoin being present to oneself and relating to others, it also evokes the torment and danger present in those same undefined spaces. It isn’t particularly odd for fiction to present itself as medium for deeper psychological reflection on our inner complexities and the ways in which they drive us to become agents, investigators, and creators in our own ways. However, there is still a lot to be said for a mystery that conceals beneath its plot an abundance of deeper mystery.
You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-Deeds-Mark-Wish/dp/1646034066
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit www.notthatmichaelcollins.com
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North of Oxford 