A postmodern whodunit that adds up to little more than a buzzkill

Michael Wilding's latest mystery novel, In the Valley of the Weed, is a strange, almost sinister book. It begins with disarming straightforwardness: an oddball PI named Plant is roused from his usual state of inertia to investigate the disappearance of a local professor whose politically incorrect email correspondence recently made national news. From the first, Wilding's knack for fluid dialogue and his confident, breezy style make the pages turn as quickly as any mystery fan could hope for. Before long, however, Wilding's conspicuous lack of interest in following the conventional rhythms of a satisfying whodunit cannot be ignored. Well before Weed's pointedly cryptic anticlimax, its persistent subversion of familiar tropes makes Wilding's true purpose clear: not to craft a good mystery but to deliberately deconstruct the form. And that's fine. To wed a given genre to postmodern theory is maybe not the freshest idea out there—few minds remain to be blown, one assumes, by the idea that a mystery's narrative dynamics change if its author does not include a concrete solution—but not every novelist can pull off an academic switcheroo quite this bold and still hold readers' interest until the end. For that success, if no other, Wilding is to be commended.

Unfortunately, Wilding's facility with lit-crit tricksterism is overshadowed by Weed's other, more immediately apparent aim: to interrogate the twenty-first century for its crime of not being the twentieth. A certain subset of readers (to which, full disclosure, this reviewer does not belong) may find Weed's premise of PC culture run amok to be timely and appealing satire. But satire works best when everybody is a target, especially the protagonist, and Wilding writes so closely from Plant's point of view that it is impossible for him to implicate Plant in much of anything but the failure to stay young. Weed's screeds against the vagaries of modern life are frequent; the list of perpetrators includes, but is not limited to, commercialized journalism, digitized libraries, the overreach of the surveillance state, the perishability of organic produce, any sensitivity to hateful speech, the sexual attractiveness of the young and independent, vanity publishers, interdisciplinary academia, airline travelers who do not dress up to fly, overly acquiescent professors, overly potent marijuana, vegan food, hippies, house sitters, and dogs. (One can only wonder how social media managed to slip through the cracks. We'll get him next time, boys!) In other words, there is nothing remotely revelatory here, but there is still an audience for this kind of thing. And that, too, is fine. Every choir likes getting preached to once in a while.

It would be nice to be able to say that readers who do not agree with all or even any of Weed's politicized content can enjoy it just as much as those who can, but it would not be the truth. Anyone who shares Plant's yearning for those halcyon days of old will have a far easier time digesting the sections of Weed that lament all things new and different—and, fair warning, without them the book would be pretty slim—than readers who consider Plant's views to be offbeat in the truest sense of the word. Wilding would probably bridle at the suggestion that he is anything but an equal-opportunity offender, but many readers will be tempted to dismiss Plant as a conservative reactionary. Their being embedded in Plant's curmudgeonly brain subjects them to a constant litany of Plant's attempts to skewer and fillet whichever aspects of contemporary life he can find fault with, and they all have a tendency to link to progressive politics somehow. Early on, Plant's initial nosing-about unearths a small supporting cast whose various uncooperative attitudes scan as natural outgrowths of their fundamental self-obsession; mechanically speaking, this tension makes for a lively and unpredictable murderers' row, but it...