“APHRODITE TRIED AND FAILED”: Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss. I would have loved this book in junior high.

Partly, that’s because I could recognize good prose! Generation Loss is a lit-suspense novel about a washed-up junkie photographer (the awful title is a photo-jargon term, not that that’s an excuse) who travels to darkest Maine to interview a reclusive artist, and stumbles into a decades-long, “the ’70s were evil”-style mystery surrounding an abandoned artists’ colony. The descriptions of Maine’s harsh beauty are terrific–some of the best nature writing I’ve read in a while–and the metaphors and assorted prosy flotsam are frequently great. The use and rhythmic recurrence of symbolism (the vicious fisher cats, the snapping turtles…) reminded me of Stephen King, which from me is a big compliment.

And the novel stars two really horrible women who are nonetheless charismatic and compelling. I mean… Cass, the washout, is the only person who knows that her ex-girlfriend died in the World Trade Center on 9/11; she sees missing-person flyers for her, but doesn’t tell the woman’s family what happened. I’m amazed that I nonetheless wanted to read about her, rather than just growling, “Yeah, whatever, Hand, you think you’re so edgy” and hurling the book away in disgust.

There are hints of Donna Tartt territory, “looking for ekstasis in all the wrong places,” although this book is just much less intelligent than The Secret History. And several of the book’s themes or elements are things I really love: “out of the past,” photography, and characters who are worthless until they’re needed, to name three.

What ruins the novel is its underlying worldview. One of the central ideas of the book, introduced very early, is that this is the story of how Cass dealt with one of the defining moments of her life: the moment when she didn’t fight her rapist. (I think this is paralleled to her 9/11 awfulness, above, and resolved in the same later sequence of actions; I really don’t like this parallel, but as prose, it’s done pretty subtly.) I’m… really interested in reading about responses to violence, and in fact, this question is the reason I kept reading when, early on, the prose was all cussy and attitudinal.

But this is a story of redemptive violence–albeit one without the usual American echoes or photonegatives of the Gospel. And it turns out that while I’m deeply drawn to stories of redemptive violence, I can’t stand those stories when they’re presented with moralizing and death-fetishism, both of which are strongly present in the book’s climax and denouement. (If you read the novel: the two places where the phrase “Good girl” appears? Haaaaaaaate.) Or to put it another way, stories of redemptive violence work as tragedy. They don’t work, at all, as a gothed-out Girl Scout Handbook.