Review: A collection of enjoyable darlings that need to be killed
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 28, 2013
According to William Faulkner, a major part of writing is being willing to "kill your darlings" - in other words, being willing to cut the pieces of writing you might love in service of the greater good of the book. It's a lesson that Reed Sprague could do with learning, because it's clear that Eddy's Current is just full of pieces of writing and character work that Sprague loves, but end up turning the book into a cluttered mess. There are intriguing bits here and there, and the overall story - a look at a religious talk show host who eventually rises to become a global demagogue and the people who struggle against him - isn't bad. But Eddy's Current is a book in deep need of an editor. Do we really need the entire text of the graduation speech that a rising intelligence agent hears as he graduates from his training? No, not really. Do we need meeting minutes for a bank that's helping to launder the demagogue's money (well, sort of)? No. And we don't need the backstory of characters who only come in for a chapter or two. And you could probably jettison the entire storyline about the freshman congressman and lose nothing from the book. Instead, Eddy's Current is meandering and overstuffed, and it ends up making little to no sense at big points simply because the reader loses track of the threads as much as Sprague does. (Sprague's tendency to switch perspectives without notice or warning doesn't help here, either.) There's lots of great bits in Eddy's Current, and I like how dedicated Sprague is to the backstories of his characters and their personalities. But he needs to learn what's necessary and what's not, and Eddy's Current is a book that's full of unnecessary details to the point where the actual plot of the book is almost impossible to find at times.