La vie secrète de E. Robert Pendleton

by Michael Collins, Jean Guiloineau (Translator)

For Robert Pendleton, a professor clinging to tenure and living in the shambles of his once-bright literary career, death seems to be the only remaining option. But his suicide attempt fails, halted at the last moment by the intervention of Adi Wiltshire, a graduate student battling her own demons of failure and thwarted ambition. During Pendleton's long convalescence, Adi discovers a novel hidden in his basement: a brilliant, semi-autobiographical story with a gruesome child-murder at its core.
The publication of Scream causes a storm of publicity: a whirlwind into which Adi, Horowitz and the still-incapacitated Pendleton are thrust. The novel is treated as an existential masterpiece and looks set to bring its author the success he's always sought - when, ironically, he is no longer in a condition to appreciate it - until questions begin to be asked about its content: in particular about the uncanny resemblance between Pendleton's fictional crime and a real-life, unresolved local murder. Enter Jon Ryder, a world-weary detective who could have walked off the pages of a police thriller, and the hunt for the murderer is on.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Contemporary, School

445 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
(1)Irish Novelist

Michael Collins was born in 1964. He was educated in Belfast, Dublin and Chicago. His short stories have been awarded the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Award in Ireland and the Pushcart Prize in America.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked this. there was a time while i was reading it when i liked it very much. i dunno - i dont read a lot of mysteries/procedural genre books (thats what teevee is for) so i dont know if this is typical. i found it slow at the start, then i got caught up in the momentum and i was really enjoying it, and then by the end my enjoyment had tapered off back into a more tepid liking of it. verdict: high three.

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd book. I feel that in terms of broad appeal, there would be too much musing on academia for the average murder mystery fan, and for those looking for insight into writing or academia, it's too much of an 'airplane reading' novel. Which is not to say the author didn't succeed in writing well enough of both things, it's just an odd pairing. Perhaps this is beach reading for professors?

While the book dips into the work of academia, it doesn't offer any real insight. The characters are well, if broadly drawn. (Of course there's a hot grad student that every man in the tale wants, right?) I think perhaps the hardboiled detective is a bit heavy handed given the rest of the novel is not written in a particularly pulp or noir style, but given the final events in the story, this characterization seems necessary to have it be believable.

While it's not generally my preferred genre, this is a satisfyingly twisty whodunnit, written, for once, by someone who can write well and paint a vivid scene. I knew who the guilty party was about half way through, but that may be more a function of having consumed so many stories with twists that I can recognize the markers being laid out over the course of the story. The set up is done well without tipping the author's hand too much.

The best, and I think most accurate description I can think of for this novel is - Very well written novelized Law and Order episode. Which is not a condemnation. Law and Order has been on for 100 years with good reason. It's an appealing format, and has fun, believable twists and turns. So if that sounds fun to you, you'll probably enjoy this.

[kp · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Literary mystery" is an oft-used term, but Collins's novel fits the bill precisely. A disaffected college professor attempts suicide, an event that leads to the discovery of mis masterpiece, a nihilistic and gruesome story of the murder of a teenaged girl. A graduate student becomes involved in the controversy surrounding the book, a controversy which ultimately touches on a real murder, as yet unsolved. Collins renders well the arid desperation of ambition and the ways in which literature both reflects and contributes to a culture gone mad with pain. The book was thrilling and intelligent, its charecters, especially Adi, the graduate student driven to despair by her commitment to academe, and Ryder, the sorrowful cop with a sordid past who re-opens the investigation into an unsolved murder. As in an earlier novel, The Keepers of Truth, Collins renders with a clear eye the moral bankruptcy at the heart of American life, where class divisions are firmer than ever and the public imagination swings from one monstrosity to another.

[Katherine Clark · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had great potential. It wanted to do more, but I think it leaned too far. It was certainly in some ways a nice critique of academia (which feels good to see), but it was also a rehashing and a trashing, so that it didn't have the useful bit to be particularly useful. I also figured out way ahead who the killer was, and was quite annoyed by the female protagonist. The book was trying to be postmodern, but, it just ended up leaving me cold. I didn't really care for or about any of the characters, except maybe Bob Pendleton, who needlessly and disappointingly, suffered. Hmmm. I don't feel the need to read anymore by this author.

[Estibaliz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aunque no es una mala novela, y de hecho está bien escrita y combina con bastante acierto el tono intelectual con la investigación criminal (si bien ésta centrándose más en lo humanista, a través de la figura de un investigador de atormentado pasado y vida familiar, que en lo científico o analítico), lo cierto es que yo no he llegado a conectar con los personajes de esta historia... excepto tal vez con las víctimas, marginales y secundarios.

Lo dejo en el punto medio, pues, de las dos estrellas y media. La premisa es interesante, pero los juegos de humo y espejos, especialmente en el final que Collins nos entrega, me han resultado bastante instatisfactorios. Demasiada digresión intelectual con personajes que, a la postre, resultan más secundarios que otra cosa.

[Manu Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Même 3,5. Des passages vraiment excellents. Le roman mélange vie universitaire et quête policière dans l'Amérique reculée. Tout ce que j'aime. Et pourtant, certains passages m'ont déçue, m'empêchant d'adhérer totalement.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel concerns itself not just with the investigation of a crime, but also with issues of authorship/appropriation, responsibility, and the ways in which one person influences the life of another, sometimes directly and profoundly, sometimes secretly and subtly.

The book begins with E. Robert Pendleton, a failure. He is a professor of English at small Bannockburn College. He does not like his job, or anything else about his lot in life. He has had occasional breakdowns, and this Homecoming weekend seems destined to bring him to another crisis as his rival, the best-selling Allen Horowitz, is coming to Bannockburn to speak. Pendleton decides to kill himself.

But Pendleton fails even to take his own life, as Adi Wiltshire (a comely grad student with no thesis in sight) and campus photographer Henry James Wright arrive in time to "save" him; Pendleton lives, but his stroke-ravaged mind is reduced to relearning the alphabet.

Adi steps in as caretaker. Stashed in Pendleton's basement she discovers unopened boxes of a novel, Scream, that he published through a vanity press. It seems to have been sitting in his basement for 10 years.

Adi realizes that Scream is Pendleton's masterpiece, a griping account of existential crisis. The book is largely autobiographical, telling the story of an unhappy professor at a small Midwestern college. Adi and Horowitz get Scream republished, the celebrity author's attention substantially raising the profile of the work.

Scream's protagonist kills a young girl and dismembers her body; he dies when his car crashes in a storm. Adi sees parallels between the book and the case of Amber Jewell, a local girl whose dismembered corpse was found in a field. In her thesis, she plans to explore how Pendleton found inspiration in real events.

Adi's research reveals that Pendleton's book was published before Amber's body was found. The possibility that Pendleton could have committed the murder stuns Adi, who burns the incriminating invoice that pinpoints Scream's original publication date.

But a tape is mailed to the police; the distorted voice hints that Pendleton should be a suspect in the Jewell case. Investigator Jon Ryder--with his own baggage of a missing wife and a daughter who accuses him of murder--comes to seek the truth.

The revived interest in Amber's death leads to more deaths and buried secrets. And there are questions of art: Will Scream win the National Book Award? Can a book that relies on the author's own experiences be called fiction? When does inspiration cross into autobiography?

There's a messiness to the book that I appreciated. Some questions are answered, others are not. People come tantalizingly close to the truth only to turn aside. Information is withheld, or misinterpreted, or lost.

Quotes
"Fiction requires a more rigorous discipline than all other art ... The stakes are so much higher, the audience is that much more intimate with language than any other medium of expression. You must get things just right. There have been child prodigies in music and mathematics, because there are elemental laws of accord and discord, but where are the child prodigies of literature? Are there any? That's a question."

"Don't slight commercial success so easily. It's not so easy to sell out--that's the pejorative popular term, right? What I want to know is, how come people like you are so seduced by the notion of an artistic relativism that elevates a lack of rigor and so-called open-endedness to an art form? Is artistic obtuseness so seductive because everything becomes relative? Is its appeal is relative mediocrity?

"Have you ever considered this might be the first epoch where there are no geniuses, that all modern art is a sham? Can one truly compare Andy Warhol's Campbell soup cans to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and if so, why not elevate the Manson family murders to pop art, to the level of an Andy Warhol, or vice versa?"

[Kelsey Salvatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book has been a great challenge for me; Michael Collins' vocabulary pushed me off the edge, making me Google the definition of at least three new words per page. I started off reading this book thinking 'I'm never going to reach the end' but now that I've completed it I feel a sense of achievement. I don't think I'll be reading it again any time in the near future though as my brain could barely keep up with the vast amounts of new language thrown my way this time. The book has made me realise that I need to expand my lexical choices, using words such as: venerable, blithe and foppish. Yes, believe it or not they are legitimate words, I promise you.

I did find the very beginning of this book to be solely focused on the academic side of things, which became monotonous over mere three chapters.
I enjoyed the speed in which the story unraveled as the book could have become tedious, but Collins moves from one thing to another quite rapidly. I became very interested in the whole 'whodunnit' theme Collins had, until he started including more and more plot twists.

Unfortunately by the end of this book I did find it to be quite confusing as it seemed to include lots of different sub-plots which got puzzling as I struggled to remember the names of each character and who they were in relation to who. The academic side of the story still hovered in the background, being mixed in with the thrill of the mystery, which I thought to be a very strange combination.

I was gripped with this novel at first but I found myself rushing in the end just to finish the book, not because the plot was poor, but because I was finding it complicated and I was getting in a muddle.

I would recommend Collins' tale for anyone who enjoys murder mystery novels as the main focus of the story is whodunnit, rather than - what I was expecting it to be - the power of words.

[Romain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce roman débute comme l'un de ces nombreux romans se déroulant dans une université américaine. Les protagonistes sont E. Robert Pendleton dans le rôle du professeur frustré qui n'a jamais pu percer en tant qu'écrivain et Adi dans le rôle de la jeune étudiante pulpeuse éprise de littérature. Pour compléter ce duo, il manquait le poil à gratter, l'élément perturbateur. Il va apparaître sous les traits d'un écrivain sans talent mais devenu célèbre depuis que lui et le professeur Pendleton suivaient les mêmes cours à l'université. La venue de ce rival, va être le déclencheur d'événements qui moisissaient depuis trop longtemps.
Au début un peu étriqué, ce roman prend rapidement de l'ampleur et n'est pas loin de perdre le lecteur à un moment tellement l'histoire se ramifie et se complexifie. C'est là que l'auteur fait preuve d'une très grande maîtrise car il arrive à maintenir le lecteur dans ses filets et ne le lâchera pas jusqu'à la fin. De roman traitant vaguement de littérature et de rivalité au sein d'un trio amoureux, il se mu en polar extrêmement efficace et intelligent. L'auteur joue avec de nombreux personnages tous très différents et atypiques. Il jongle également avec les époques car les évènements actuels trouvent leur origine dans le passé trouble de cette petite ville des Etats-Unis. Il fait également référence au crime de Leopold et Loeb qui est relaté dans l'excellent roman Crime de Meyer Levin dont j'avais parlé ici et que je vous conseille également de lire. http://www.aubonroman.com/2012/01/la-...

[Anna Richland · Rating 2 out of 5]

At 40 pages in, already annoyed that Adi's character was doing the hard work of being BOTH a Madonna and a whore for the story, I was pretty sure I'd figured this out and that what remained of the next 260-odd pages would be style, red herrings, and more style. I checked the back. I was correct. Furthermore, the ending dipped in and out of omniscient point of view ("Investigators confirmed the alarming and spiraling sequence of events … Investigators reconstructing the crime scene … The investigation was abandoned when …" etc).

I'm sure this book will work for many people, but I prefer deeper points of view and less of this: "Handpicked by the Chair, Adi was, at second glance, an amorous, big-breasted, longtime grad student, a true lover of literature who was known to have tit-fucked no fewer than two Pulitzer Prize recipients." (p 11). I know that this is nominally from the odious POV of Pendleton, but there's nothing that Adi herself expresses in the next 30 pages to really counter that -- the author doesn't set up any contrast for that description, not really. So I'm left to conclude that that's how the reader is supposed to see her, how the author wants us to see her -- thankfully I'm not a completist, thus a DNF.

[Lorin Cary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collins provides a marvelous run through the world of academia and schools of literary criticism in a mystery filled with plot twists that pull you forward. It isn't immediately clear who the protagonist is, and I'll leave that up to you to find out. At the center of the story is a murder and a novel which seems to place it's author in the shoes of the murderer. So is it fiction or autobiography? A graduate student unable to find a thesis topic, a detective in a failing marriage, a professor who hates what he's doing, a Vietnam vet now a perpetual student and photographer, and a best selling author filled with hot air---what a cast. And what a read!

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

i guess i forgot to add this to my books when i signed up with goodreads. i read this a couple of years back now. i just read karen's review, and actually, its so accurate, i guess all i can say is "ditto." this is not collins' best book, but i just love his writing. i recommend him all the time to people, since most haven't heard of him. he's one of those gritty, real, marrow-of-the-human-psyche writers. and i mean that in all the best ways. he reminds me of another writer who should be far more well-known than he is: daniel woodrell.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must admit that I didn't give this book a fair read. I will be retiring in a couple of days - after 31 years. I started this book quite some time ago and constantly picked it up to read and put it down after a few pages. Too many distractions - too many forms to fill out and too many decisions to make. Perhaps I would have liked it better if I had given it a better chance but I think not. I finally finished it just so I can pick something new from the pile of unread books I have accumulated in the meantime. New book, 'new' life.

[Arwen56 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Romanzo un po’ sfilacciato, incentrato sul mondo accademico, che utilizza la trama gialla per analizzare le motivazioni di due scrittori, entrambi dotati di talento, ma di diversa fortuna, e di un terzo aspirante artista che, invece, di talento ne ha poco, ma di iniziativa molta, soprattutto di tipo poco ortodosso.

Alla lunga, stanca un po’, sia perché si perde in diversi rivoli secondari, tipo i problemi matrimoniali dell’investigatore o la bizzarra infanzia di quella che poi diventerà la curatrice dell’opera di uno dei personaggi, sia perché, alla fin fine, la sostanza non è molta.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

A genuinely enjoyable and hilarious novel. It sat on my shelf for years, because I enjoy Michael Collins' work but assumed that this novel would either be a boring, Woody Allen-esque plot with the older professor falling in love with his graduate student, that it would be a pretentious meditation on Art, or that it would be a satire of academic life similar to Nabokov's Pnin or Waugh's Decline and Fall. Instead, it turned out to be a marvelous satire of all of these genres. When it twists into a crime procedural, Collins plays around with the tropes of mystery novels in a humorous and intelligent way, with the character of Ryder an extension of the vigilante, wild-card detective with a messy home life.

I think that the novel could, at times, almost read like a book-version of cheap satires that simply reference tropes in an obvious way. However, Collins engages with these tropes in an intelligent way through the complex characters. He shows a sharp instinct not only for the absurdities of academia (the constant references to the masturbatory, self-referential, and useless industry of criticism of criticism of criticism of literary works will resonate with anyone who studied English in university). Horowitz's glamorous front of the best-selling novelist who transitioned from glitterati author to unapologetic sellout Personality, we come to learn, conceals his own awareness of the vapidity of his work. What I worried about with the grad student - that she'd be the cliche beautiful, intelligent (but not threateningly so) love interest - only applied at a superficial level. Instead, Collins draws out the complex character of Adi to show a woman who, feeling that she has nothing else to offer, plays to the type out of a sense of self-preservation. At times the satire comes off as straight-up caustic, with some jokes laugh-out-loud funny but very dark, and the genuineness of the main characters tempers it.

The plot wasn't suspenseful in the way that a mystery novel would be, and there are points in the book when it did seem to drag. However, I found that the novel's construction was really well-done: the book transitions seamlessly from a Decline and Fall-type insight into an elitist institution that reproduces privilege with the illusion of providing a liberal education to a satire of a mystery novel to a genuine exploration of the sad lives of those who live outside the Bannockburn bubble. I found that the scenes with the detective were hilarious in that they were so obviously referencing the outrageous tropes of the genre (the exaggerated stories of Ryder's unprofessional behaviour following his wife's disappearance is a funny play on the cliche of the police officer with an axe to grind, for example), and the intersection between this plotline and the absurd academic world provides some of the funnier moments in the novel.

More broadly, though, what I enjoyed about the incorporation of the mystery element is that it allows for a stark contrast between the academic world and the world outside. At the beginning of the novel, we see the superficially ridiculous world of the academics. When it's discovered that Pendleton's novel is based on an actual murder that occurred decades before this novel takes place, though, the low-income rural community surrounding the university makes the "competition for tenure" world, with its vanity publishing houses and useless research projects, all the more insulated and absurd. The lives of those affected by the murder of a local girl from a troubled, impoverished rural family in a community left behind by the modern economy are written about in such an empathetic way that Collins takes what could have been just a superficial "academia's ridiculous" novel and transforms it into a satire juxtaposed with the sad reality of the world for whom Bannockburn is out of reach. This adds complexity to the satire while also making the novel more interesting to read because the world is built beyond just the insular university. And, just as the empathy with which Collins has written the academic characters adds depth to that satirical plotline, the dark humour and irony threaded throughout the novel prevents the sadness of the murder plotline from devolving into trite sentimentalism.

The book was well-constructed, hilarious, and very enjoyable. A very petty annoyance was a style issue - I don't know if this was an editing thing or what, but there are so many misplaced modifiers that at times it's difficult to understand or follow along. I wish the editors had used more Oxford commas or reigned in the random sentences that are structured unintelligibly.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange story, strangely told.

Robert Pendleton, professor at a midwestern college, is bitter about his fate as a writer. He is hosting a visiting writer, Allen Horowitz, who had been a fellow student when they were young. The visitor is wildly successful, while Pendleton's works have faded into oblivion.

Because Pendleton has lately been phoning in his lectures, creating dissatisfaction among his students and the faculty, his boss insists that he bring along a graduate student to help greet the visitor. The grad student is Adi Wiltshire. A fan of Horowitz's, she has been working on her thesis for a long time and has a reputation for providing extra benefits to visiting professors.

Pendleton has more than a little difficulty with his hosting job. Ultimately, he loses it, and lands in the hospital, where Adi visits. In her wanderings around his house, Adi discovers a book by Pendleton that she had not seen before. She reads it and is enthralled.

At the heart of the book is the murder of a child. The circumstances of the crime are similar to a real murder committed some years before. She works with Horowitz to get the book republished and it is a sensation. But a sensation with a dark secret.

The narration is omniscient, shifting from person to person. It's difficult knowing who is the protagonist. Although he is out of it for much of the book, I kept pulling for the professor, whom I didn't even particularly like. I didn't much like any of the characters, which is why I kept wondering if I even liked the book. It's ingenious and it did keep me reading.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really quite strange book, it doesn't seem to know if it's a study of academic life and literary criticism, or a generic crime potboiler, or a study of criticism of generic crime potboilers. Starting off following the titular Professor Pendleton, a frustrated, failing academic, it's almost Stoner-esque, until you realise he's the architect of his own problems. Then comes the suicide attempt, and the discovery of his brilliantly-written but never properly published Scream while he's incapacitated, followed by the discovery of the possibility that it might be an autobiographical account of his murder of a local girl.

It's really quite beautifully depicted, but the crime aspect of the book becomes more of a distraction, and there's some pretty poor leaps in logic that I feel the likes of James Lee Burke wouldn't make. Enjoyable, but not quite a resounding success.

[Thomas Cooney · Rating 3 out of 5]

An engaging premise that falls too often into predictability and cliché. Saved by the writing when it shines:

<< “Fiction requires a more rigorous discipline than all other art.”
“How so?”
“Jesus, for starters, the stakes are so much higher, the audience is that much more intimate with language than any other medium of expression. You must get things just right. There have been child prodigies in music and mathematics, because there are elemental laws of accord and discord, but where are the child prodigies of literature? Are there any?” >>

[Monica Ramsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. The story didn't go at all where I expected it to, which was exciting. It was dense, at times, but I believe that contributed to its overall criticism of academia, so that message was strongly delivered. The characters really kept the story going, and I was anxious to see how this investigation of whether or not professor and writer Pendleton killed a young girl a decade before would change those characters. It's also got some good creepy parts.

[Cliff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mystery wrapped up in a novel about academia with the title character in a coma for much of the book. A detective with a bad home life ( do any of them actually lead a normal life?) tasked with solving a cold case, then becoming fixated with it even when told to stop. I'm sure the book has much more merit than many I read. Did I enjoy it? Not really but I felt it merited finishing.

[Deepak Saxena · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a difficult work to read and rate. Not because it being some kind of literary masterpiece, but due to a mixing of genres. It tries to be an existential and crime story at the same time - and in the process slightly frustrating the readers of both geners. Still, a good read for those who are interested in the world of academia, which is the setting of the story in this work.

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely ridiculous waste of time. Terribly written, awash in navel-gazing, and lacking any redeeming qualities. Characters were all terrible people. Event reconstruction so disjointed as to be incomprehensible. Fundamental misunderstanding of the use of the comma.

[Aarón · Rating 5 out of 5]

De esos libros que deseas continuar un capítulo tras otro.

Los protagonistas escritores en las novelas son mis favoritos.

[Danm · Rating 3 out of 5]

You lost me, bro.

Started out amazing, then faded due to different POVs and lack of engagement.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, but the plot is lacking. Gotta love a man who drops Stephen King's name as often as possible.

[Lieselot Mauroo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed emotions about this one. The first 60 or so pages bored me to tears, the rest was better and I suppose it was okay, but nothing about it really blew me away.

[Nefty123 · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book dwelled too much in psychology. The plot by itself was interesting. But the psychology made all the characters act and sound the same.

[Maggie Koger]

This novel starts so slowly I gave up. I was surprised that it wasn't anything I would enjoy.

[CAROL · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting but difficult book.

A mystery but written in the style of English comment & criticism: theme of Nietschze's superman. Deliberate attempts to mislead from the real killer.

[Lucie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent thriller. I found the end rather disappointing.