Duplicate Keys

Alice, an orderly librarian, is drawn into a murder mystery when her friend, a temperamental musician named Craig shot dead in his apartment. Their group of friends, who came to New York City together to make a life for themselves and for two, hit it big in the music business are in turns suspicious and supportive of their companions. A detective begins to examine the case, probing further and further into their lives, and it begins to seem to Alice that one of her friends may be the murderer. Smiley excels at describing intimate details of every day life and has an ear for dialogue. The result is a book more leisurely than your average murder mystery, but still worth reading. Indeed the murder seemed to be more tacked on to the story, then having been the hub around which it revolved.

Jane Smiley writes about families and relationships, not murder mysteries, so it's a feather in her cap for versatility that she acquits herself more than decently on this atypical novel of hers. The murders have already taken place before we begin, so the rest of the novel has us backtracking through a minefield of relationships that once bound the friends together. Quite clearly, the network has collapsed beneath the growing rot that nobody seemed to care to notice until the inevitable happened. The friendship, if you could call it that, was undermined by a combination of sexual betrayal, professional jealousies and other dependencies and left to find its own bloody equilibrium. The narrator Alice Ellis' voice isn't an unequivocal one. It's hard to nail her personality down or even decide whether she's likeable or not. She's bitter, insecure, vulnerable, defiant and bitchy all at the same time. But then again, we are reminded that Smiley is always more interested in the people than the plot and so it shouldn't be too surprising that we get an edgy character for a heroine and some excellent characterisation to boot.Some readers have complained about the identity of the murderer being predictable. I don't. If there's an awkward and unsatisfactory element in the story, it's in the romantic subplot. Henry may be the secret lover who lives across the street but he doesn't belong. He should have been saved for Smiley's next book about Alice. Smiley may have set out to write a different novel but she couldn't help but leave large traces of her familiar genre behind. Still, "Duplicate Keys" is a hugely enjoyable novel. Recommended.

An oddly powerful book, and one where its power sort of slowly creeps up on you, tugs at you when you least expect it.Smiley is torn between two things, I think: she wants to write a literary novel, but for one reason or another (she wants to be published, I'd wager) she is MARRIED to the conventions of the mystery. She is GLUED to them-- most mystery writers aren't as conventional as this. And yet, the mix is actually quite interesting. On the one hand, some of Smiley's handling of the mystery elements are so exasperating that you wonder why she bothered at all: the insultingly stereotypical detective character, the AWFUL romantic subplot, not mention her troubling presentation of gay characters. But on the other hand, the genre holds Smiley in place-- IMO, she's often given to navel gazing, but the gauntlet of the mystery plot keep her from becoming too distracted. In some places the combination is perfect, in others distracting, and in others, downright irrating. (If I had a nickel for everytime in the novel the main character does something and then explains in interior dialogue that she isn't sure why, I could have bought the book in hardback.)But I call this a four star novel, just because there's something here-- I don't want to say what exactly for fear of spoiling the book-- but eventually Duplicate Keys works up a strange kind of power. This is an angry, desperate book. Alarmingly so. And that raw, brutal sort of emotion allows you to forgive a lot of what came before.Read it and see.

Perhaps Ms. Smiley's best work. A novel about the secrets that lie between even the closest of friends. The unspoken and presumed to be well known "facts" keep the characters from knowing as much about one another as they think they do. The characters are well portrayed with different motives and desires. This book isn't always about who did the crime so much as why. In the end this novel becomes a bittersweet indictment of near fame and the havoc it reeks.