Hudson Valley Bookshelf
Featuring Local Authors & Regional Interests

The-Devil-and-All in Webster
by Celia Bland

Review of The Webster Chronicle by Daniel Akst. New York: Penguin Putnam, hardcover, 320 pages, $24.95

     Terry Mathers, one of the heroes of Daniel Akst's new novel, The Webster Chronicle, well knows that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The stammering offspring of a Walter Cronkite-like TV reporter, Terry has forsaken his job at a big city daily to resuscitate a small New England weekly. He intends to do some good in the world, and his beneficiaries include his wife Abigail, who abandoned her law practice to become publisher of The Chronicle, her daughter, their son, and the entire town of Webster where he grew up. The problem is, nothing is turning out as it might or ought and Terry is losing faith. He partakes of the demon weed; daydreams through city council meetings he should be reporting on; and has left his wife. You could call him a bankrupt idealist and the Chronicle an idea going bankrupt. Much of his day is spent idly in his glass-walled office, wondering how he will tell his father that he can't repay the $200,000 he borrowed to finance a fizzling dream.
     Into this slough of despond comes Diana Shirley, a sexy ex-Lesbian expert in child abuse. They begin an affair and before you can say "conflict of interest," she is discovering cases of sexual abuse at the tony Alphabet Soup daycare, and he is reporting her findings as truth in the newspaper. Hysteria of the kind The Crucible describes ensues. Diana finds abusers under every bush and in every classroom; a mechanic is even arrested for torturing children in his garage. Eventually the town cottons on to the fact that child abuse on the scale described by Webster's susceptible three-year-olds is a logistic impossibility; but not before the unfolding of a series of events so unfortunate that Terry, who does not believe in God, develops a firm belief in the devil.
     Meanwhile, The Chronicle champions the cause of a local department store threatened by a takeover baron. This establishment has deep roots in the community and is run (badly) by a scion of the town's wealthiest family (with whom Abigail is having an affair). She, too, with the best intentions, finds herself compromised by the scion's proffers of stock options, romantic dinners, and full-page ads in The Chronicle.
     And that's not all. The Webster Chronicle has all the page-turning twists and turns of an old-time serial, with some real witches, a martyr or two, and a great deal of intelligent commentary on contemporary mores thrown in for spice. The author has a weakness for flagging important bits of information, but the reader won't mind a few pokes in the ribs once the timepiece of a plot, with all its elaborate cycles of movement, begins to chime. Readers will note direct analogies to the real-life trials of childcare workers accused of sexual abuse in the 1980s and 90s, but Akst's richest emotional terrain is the relationship between Terry and his father, a statesman of the airwaves whose private life is a shambles. Their comic and touching tête à têtes provide the commentary, and eventually the conscience, that disarms Webster's witch hunt. (Indeed, readers familiar with Salem village's infamous trials will be reminded of another pair of Mathers-Increase and his stuttering son, Cotton-who filled similar roles.) Akst's gift for turns of phrase and his obvious reportorial skills can sometimes distance the reader from the emotional predicaments of his characters, but that is never true when he describes the curiously intermeshed identities of this père and fils, both reporters, both overgrown boys struggling toward maturity. Their eventual ends, so far from their beginnings, makes this reviewer doubt her own opening line. Perhaps William Blake said it better: "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom" -although it may look, and even feel, like the Hot Place.

Celia Bland is a writer who lives in Tivoli.