Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 31, 1993 TAG: 9310310225
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by NEIL HARVEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As "A Simple Plan" opens, Hank Mitchell, a small town accountant, and his\ brother Jacob and Jacob's buddy, Lou, are wandering through a snow covered\ patch of Ohio woods. The last thing they expect to find is a small, recently\ crashed airplane. They are even more surprised, as they enter the wreckage, to\ discover the plane's cargo, a duffle bag containing just under four and a half\ million dollars.
The heart of this story is that old moral dilemma: if you find lost money,\ do you get to keep it, or do you have to turn it in?
The three men decide to keep the cash. Their simple plan involves hiding the\ money until the plane is discovered so they can find out the money's history.\ If the bills are clean, they'll split everything three ways and disappear; if\ the money is marked, they'll destroy it. All they have to do is keep quiet and\ wait.
The problem is, Jacob and Lou aren't incredibly bright, aren't gifted with\ a whole lot of willpower, and they're just about stone broke. Hank, the\ narrator, is the smartest of the three, but he's not nearly as intelligent as\ he imagines, and he manages to keep the big secret from his domineering,\ passive-aggressive wife for all of about 20 minutes. The simple plan fractures\ into multiple pieces and pretty soon, nobody can trust anybody.i
Further complications ensue. In order to keep the theft of the money a\ secret, more crimes must eventually be committed, and after a while the main\ characters aren't nearly as interested in keeping the money as they are in not\ getting caught. Matters might be helped if at least a couple of the characters\ were playing with an entirely full deck, but they aren't, and it doesn't take\ too long to figure out that one of them is a full-blown psycho.
Way before the novel ends, Hank regards the money and woefully confesses,\ "I should've turned it in right from the start."
I'll admit that there isn't anything overwhelmingly original about Smith's\ first novel. With its ultra-bleak settings and situations, and its calm,\ rationalizing murderer, this book could be a literary "Blood Simple" with snow.\ The lunatic who haunts "A Simple Plan" bears more than a passing resemblance to\ the whacked-out, serial killing sheriff of Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside\ Me." And Smith's commentaries about greed, paranoia and the contrasts between\ public guilt and private guilt are, although apt and carefully written,\ standard fare in novels about criminals. These sections are just strong enough\ to make you realize that Smith isn't nearly as adept at describing\ gut-clenching self-doubt as, for example, Michael Tolkin can be (which actually\ might be a point in Smith's favor).
But even as Smith pieces together familiar situations and characters, and\ even as he moves them down a familiar track, there's no denying the overall\ allure of "A Simple Plan." The pace is brisk and the descriptions are vivid.\ The author somehow manages to take thoroughly unlikable characters, stuck\ under a terminal cloud of fear and dread (just check out the first two\ paragraphs if you ever happen to feel just a little too happy) and he makes\ them interesting and real.
In a world where people might argue over something as simple as a parking\ space, Smith's book is about what would happen, almost undoubtably, if that\ space were buried under hundred dollar bills.
- Neil Harvey lives in Blacksburg.
by CNB