Obedience: A Novel

As a university professor, I enjoy mysteries in the college setting. Particularly in this case, the normally predictable world of higher education makes Obedience a quick and engaging read. Prof. Williams gives his students a single puzzle to solve for either an "A" or an "F" in his logic course. Is the puzzle an academic exercise or do students need to solve the puzzle to stop something horrible from happening? This thriller entices the reader to contemplate college relationships, professor-student indiscretion, the helplessness parents feel when their children are away at college, the role of graduate assistants, academic creativity, and more. I admit the book's ending blind-sided me. I'm enough of a mystery buff that few books accomplish this feat. Although I immediately started a mental argument with the author over his explanations, before long, I was thinking. . . "I know just which course I teach where I should require students to read this book!" I loved it.

. . . a show with no net." A small liberal arts university in Indiana . . . A mysterious professor . . . a logic class. The assignment: A young woman will be murdered in six weeks unless the class can identify the perp. Mystification, misdirection, to say nothing of role-playing result. The tale focuses on three of the students--Mary, Dennis, and Brian--as they try not only to solve the professor's mystery, but also his true identity. Each chapter produces another red herring, another dead end. What is actually going on? Is a house occupied or not? Is a book real or not? Has a woman been beaten or not? Well, of course in the final chapters you'll find out. I shouldn't say anything more here, except to note that the writing style is dry, austere, and distant--and nothing like Fowles's "The Magus." The novelist Paul Auster is constantly referenced, and it seems clear to me Mr. Lavender is a fan. Notes and asides: If you've never heard of Stanley Milgrim, the suggestion here is that you Google him before beginning the book . . . at one point the three students check into a hotel, and they pool their dwindling cash to buy a room. But one of them drives a Lexus--he ought to have had a credit card . . . A bartender talks on page 194 of pancaked galaxies. On page 202 Mary remembers this as pancaked universes. Mary's correct. Is this an oversight, or has the author merely having Mary subtly self-correcting what she'd heard from the bartender?

...was I could actually imagine one, if not all four, of my college-enrolled "young-adults" (God help my wife and I) caught up in the intriguing puzzle laid out in Obedience. For the same inexplicable reason they each sat for hours--for days--twisting that Rubic's cube nightmare until their fingers bleed, not to mention their obsession with the computer game, Myst, they would have dogged after the missing girl, Polly, risking their lives and skipping classes (which in my day was life threatening) to solve the mystery. I think Mr. Lavender captured the irrationality of the MySpace Generation that only parents of said iPodders can appreciate. Although, I did find the scene in Cale, where the students combine their meager wallets to pay for a hotel room, completely implausible. My kids would have called Dad for a credit card number, or at the very least, pleaded for a wiring of cash to the local post office. But that's a minor issue...lol. All in all, I read the book with no expectations and came away with a contented smile.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation in which you begin to question not only your surroundings, your senses, or your actions, but the actual reality of the situation itself? Perhaps you've had a dream that seemed so real that, while still in the dream, you convinced yourself that it wasn't a dream in the same manner in which you'd convince yourself of that reality while actually not dreaming, whether it be through pinching yourself, slapping yourself, or looking around for anything that doesn't belong.... If yes, you know how Mary Butler feels when she gets caught up in, and taken over by, the assignment (the only assignment) in Logic & Reasoning 204, taught by the mysterious Professor Williams at mid-western Winchester College. (None of the students taking the class had actually ever seen Professor Williams; pictures of him in old annuals were always of just a hand or an arm, though the caption indicates his presence. Had he just always been at the wrong place at the wrong time for these photos, or had he, as I like to imagine, always been successful at staying just far enough away, so as to never get "caught" by the camera?) The assignment seems simple. Find Polly. Or else....she dies. It's important to note here that "Polly", and the eventual "murder" of said Polly, is only a "hypothetical". Right? Because a teacher couldn't actually get away with kidnapping and/or murdering a young girl just so a few students could get some college credit. Right??? That is what Mary thought until strange things began happening. E-mailed clues, meant to provide hints to the students as to the TIME, PLACE, MOTIVE, and CIRCUMSTANCE, begin to hit a little too close to home for Mary. The line between reality and hypothetical-kidnap-in-college-class is suddenly blurred, and Mary finds herself in the middle of a chase for much more than just those college credits alluded to earlier. Can she trust her Professor? Can she trust her classmates, Dennis and Brian, who are also experiencing the blurring of that line? Can she trust her best friend, Summer, who, much to Mary's surprise, appears in one of Professor Williams' photo clues? Can she trust the Professor's wife, who, as Mary is leaving a party hosted at his house, hands Mary a note saying "None of this is real. I AM NOT HIS WIFE". Can you trust...your best friend? Of course you can. You know your best friend; your best friend has been there for you for as long as you can remember; you know that your best friend will be there for you long into the future. But it's exactly that kind of knowledge...that which you tell yourself over and over that you KNOW is real...that Lavender sets up just to bowl over in this EXTRAORDINARY tale about how far we (as humans) will go to help those in need. Read it. You won't be disappointed.

OBEDIENCE, Will Lavender's debut novel, is a puzzle. Three students at Indiana's Winchester University are taking a philosophy class --- Logic & Reasoning 204 --- and have been given a very bizarre assignment from Professor Williams (that's Professor L. Williams to you). Before the end of the term --- a scant six weeks --- they must locate a hypothetical young girl named Polly. If they fail to do so, then she will be murdered. Williams, slightly and indefinably but unquestionably creepy, isn't kidding around; he will guide the students along, providing them with occasional clues that will either help or mislead. The makeup of the class is an interesting one. Brian House is a somewhat abrasive lad, all sharp edges that conceal a deep sorrow he doesn't share with his classmates. Mary Butler is trying to deal with the end of a love affair during her freshman year with Dennis Flaherty, a button-down, coat-and-tie frat boy who happens to be taking the class as well. Flaherty has a secret of his own --- one that involves Elizabeth Orman, the wife of the Winchester University dean, a woman with whom he is becoming slowly, surely and unhealthily obsessed. And Orman? She might have the largest, grandest secret of all. Professor Williams's assignment is tossed into this emotional maelstrom. As Butler, House and Flaherty uneasily start to come together to solve it, they begin to realize that the problem he has tossed their way is based on a real-world mystery involving a young girl who went missing some two decades ago. Furthermore, it seems that Polly is far from a fictional character. The more information they unearth, however, the more perplexing things become, until it appears that Williams himself may be involved in the disappearance and possible murder of an innocent --- and that history may well repeat itself. Lavender has crafted an infuriating, brilliant puzzle at the heart of a novel that compels continuous, non-stop reading from beginning to end to discover how everything winds up. Flaherty's infatuation with Orman is perfectly presented without falling into the trap of stereotype --- every college campus has at least one fetching professor's wife, and a male student who would love to take advantage of her --- and Butler's unrequited and unresolved yearning for Flaherty provides an additional unsettling element to a book brimming over with them. In addition, there are some literary references that, while not exactly clues, will guide you in the right direction (maybe) and a few hints here and there about the "why" of what's occurring in OBEDIENCE. And then there's that title... Don't miss this intriguing and addicting psychological thriller from a talented new writer worthy of our undivided attention. --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub