What most drew me to Mangan’s novel, amid all the buzz about its being the psychological thriller of the year as well as an exploration of its concerns worthy of Graham Greene or Patricia Highsmith or perhaps even Robert Stone, was the strong narrative voice and superb writing, reminiscent on both counts of such stellar instances of the genre as Louise Doughty’s “Apple Tree Yard”, Ellen Feldman’s “The Unwitting” and Vendela Vida’s “The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty.” And indeed the voice and writing are such that I’d nominate Mangan’s novel as a model to be aspired to in any creative writing course in the land. On other counts I’m less enthusiastic, though, mostly for how the novel to my mind diffuses itself in trying to be three things at once -- a character study of two young college women in which one is dominated by the other, an expat drama in which Tangier, with an ever-increasing sense of menace, is as much a character as the two women or a psychological thriller slowly working its way toward a revelatory finale where the levers required to pull it off may have some readers scratching their heads. To be fair, though, a certain amount of what critics of the genre would call gimmickry is perhaps endemic to the genre, even in so accomplished an instance of the genre as “Apple Tree Yard,” where the movie version, absent the novel's good writing, made manifest some of my issues with the novel -- most pointedly for me, what exactly it was about her lover that so attracted the main character in the first place and why other than just to create reader suspense the prosecutor in the climactic court scene would have stretched out so long asking if the main character was familiar with Apple Tree Yard. It certainly made for a strong prologue, enough so that the prologue was apparently what sold the novel, but in a real courtroom you have to wonder if the prosecutor wouldn’t simply have moved things along.
That’s lot of detail about “Apple Tree Yard,” admittedly, and its movie version, in a review of “Tangerine,” but of the works I’ve cited, “Apple” seems to me perhaps closest in technique and intent to what Mangan had in mind -- as well as good company indeed for a debut novelist. And with word of a movie version of “Tangerine” being in the works, it will be interesting to see how well that novel transfers to the screen -- and how exactly its final revelation will be handled in that medium. At any rate, Mangan’s novel, with its superb writing, is well worth the time spent reading it, and it will be interesting to see what this writer comes up with next.
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Tangerine
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