Castle Freeman’s new novel, Go With Me, has been called “a gem that ... cuts like a knife” by the Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews asserts that “if all novels were this good, Americans would read more.” It is the archetype of the kind of fiction that everyone has enjoyed since second grade, but it is also respectable and critically acclaimed. What could possibly go wrong?
Pretty much everything. The author’s voice is admirably close to those of his characters, whose dialogue makes up most of the novel. But none of these voices are worth committing to paper. On page one, we meet the sheriff. On page two, Lillian—the protagonist—shows up. They are stock characters trapped in stock conversation.
The dialogue acts in a superficial “hard-boiled” manner that barely masks its artifice, meaningless repetition, and relentless banality. Sheriff Wingate is supposed to be a force for decency, and Lillian a plucky heroine, but characters that talk in such a way cannot be sympathetic.
Go With Me is only 160 pages, and though most of the words can be skipped without disrupting comprehension, it feels much longer. There is nothing to propel it forward, save a wisp of a malefactor (laughably named Blackway) who is only introduced at the very end. “I wanted to withhold him and so make him a mystery,” Freeman explained in an interview. But a reader must feel curiosity toward a mystery, and when Blackway appears at the climax, he is as lifeless as everyone else.
The buildup itself is also feebly handled. Lillian is somehow simultaneously on the run from Blackway and on an urgent mission to find him. As Freeman explained, it’s “an updated, rural New England version of the Malory Tale of Sir Gareth.” Surely the quest should drive the plot, but Freeman dedicates mostly every other chapter to a group of men at a decrepit mill.
“The various digressions are there to add diversity, complexity, and, I hope, humor,” Freeman defended—but they are not funny, and “diversity” and “complexity” are buzzwords as empty as the digressions themselves. Instead, the plot stagnates, the narrator makes lame formulations like “Whizzer’s accident ... had taken things from him, and it had given him things,” and the characters articulate non-thoughts like “If my sister had tried to go to school in an outfit like that when we were kids, my dad would have whipped her, and my mom would have held her down while he did it.”
But the most painful aspect of Go With Me is not the inanity of the characters’ language, but the transparency of Freeman’s thoughts—transparent to the reader, at least. “I have been a bit puzzled at how willing many readers and reviewers have been to take this book as a thriller or mystery. That wasn’t what I thought I was doing,” Freeman said. This begs the question of how many other intentions he bungled. Unlike any good novelist, he sweats out every contrivance, agonizes over every description, and records every idea he has through the mouthpieces of Lillian and company instead of leaving it to the reader to fill in the gaps.
Plus, every joke and every conceit is over-explained or worn out. In chapter four, there is a “little yapping dog.” A page later, Freeman finds it necessary to describe it again as a “little brown dog” that “yapped.” “Shut up,” one of the woodsmen says to the dog—on pages 32, 33, 34, and 35. Five pages pass, but just when you think it’s over, how does the chapter end?
“His dog yapped and yapped.” “Shut up,” Fitzgerald told the dog.
No, you shut up.
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