Pocket books, 1993, 307pp.
You know you're reaching when you're down on an author's characters about their taste in jewellry and attitudes towards birth technologies instead of worrying about pacing and character development. Mary Higgins Clark started her thriller career with Where Are The Children?, and continued it with The Cradle Will Fall, which were my introduction to this writer. I didn't like the following books as well, but feel she's back on track with I'll be Seeing You.
The novel opens with Meghan Collins, a newly hired reporter, covering the stabbing death of a young woman eerily similar in appearance. Compounding the mystery is the only clue on the body, a slip of paper with Megan's name and work number written in her missing father's hand. Clues about Edwin Collins’ secret life, presumed dead in a horrendous traffic accident, but whom begins to be suspected of disappearing instead, intertwine helically with evidence of an unraveling fraud at an assisted birth technology center.
If art is an abstraction of of the artist's experiences, and writing the illumination of the author's interior world, then successful thrillers must the reflection of society's deepest fears. Children–and both the love parents bear for them and they for their parents–is a recurring theme in Clark's stories. Harm to this relationship forms the core of all three novels. In the first (and still my fave), a sicko stalks two young children; in the second, Cradle a meglomaniac doctor attempts to implant alien embryos in women normally unable to conceive. His scheme begins to come apart when a murdered woman, half of a caucasion couple, is revealed to be pregnant with an asian child.
That was written over ten years ago, and birth technology has made considerable advances. It is clear that Clark has a deep, abiding love for children, and an intimate sense of the parent-child bond. It is equally clear that the ever improving technologies that both allow formerly barren women to bear children, and the resulting blurrings in the certainty of maternal parentage, once only a male province, trouble her deeply. Once upon a time, if a baby came out of your body, you knew it was yours. That's no longer the case.
Changelings, of course, have troubled society for a very long time; but now the fairies are people in white coats, and if Clark's well-to-do, college educated protagonists are supposed by virtue of station and sophistication to overlook those doctors’ encroaching on the realm of God, Clark makes clear through the mouths of the blue (and pink) collar characters her opinions on this hubris.
And that, frankly, is where my difficulty with the book comes in. Not in the characterization, which is consistent and empathetic, nor the copious research, nor in pacing, which as usual is very good, nor in the plot, which, in having two unrelated murderers, who yet are interlocked in their spiralling towards Meghan, quite possibly echo the double helix at the heart of the story in a very witty way. My values are not those of author, of mainstream America, and the implication annoys me.
Recently I've been reading a great many regency romances. It's a popular genre, and stories typically revolve around lords and ladies, or in the case of Jane Austen, who thought she was writing about the times but in reality was the very first regency romance author, of good country families. This subgenre is extraordinarily popular, and I like a good regency with the best of them, revelling in the characters and their attitudes. Clark, when you stop to think about it, with protagonists of the wealthy, conservative classes—doctors, lawyers, successful restaurant owners and consulting firm partners—and secondary characters of clerks, receptionists, —has made nearly an exact transposition of Jane Austen's country families or Georgette Heyer's regency Quality and their cant speaking servants onto modern American society.
I love Heyer's characters, so why not an equal enthusiasm for Clark's? I have the feeling that most of regency England combined the same slight awe, envy, and irritation with their titled classes as I do with my society's upper crust, a sobering comment on the ease with which I, like so many others, are happy to lay a romantic veil on the iniquities of the past while deprecating those same conditions in the present. I'd like to think that's not the case, but novels populated with beautifully groomed persons wearing couture clothes and gold jewellery going on expensive cruises seem to invariably set my teeth on edge. There's nothing wrong with wearing exquisitely cut wool jackets, cultured pearls or smooth heavy gold chains. My mother has been known to wear all three, though usually not at the same time.
But what about equal time for torn jeans, hippie beads, and green hair? Pa-nang curry and tandoori chicken, for fancy French cuisine and down home american fare? Erratic, poorly paid, but soul satisfying careers for those of the successful doctors and lawyers? How do these characters always have such perfect figures when they never so much as put on a jogging suit, let alone do something active like ride a bike or lift weights? (Why do I get the feeling that messing around with bicycle chain grease and bike tops, which unlike the bottoms are not flattering to any kind of figure, is too undignified?) Perhaps that is why I tolerate Heyer's characters better—some are indeed frippery fellows only concerned about clothes—but others are sportsmen, some even (more or less, within the constraints of the time) work for their living, as soldiers or managing their estates—and a good many of them, male and female, are willing to buck convention, laughing at themselves all the while. That (I hope) is the essential difference.
I've never thought of myself as a particularly bohemian soul, but I grew up reading science fiction. I still can't understand what all the fuss is about cloning. Frankly, I think all the industrial waste dumped in our watersheds, and other environmental pollutants of a similar nature, pose a much greater hazard to my DNA. (A central point of interest in the current Clark story is that a woman bears twins, or, we are more properly told, a clone, three years apart. Why, if a zygote splits into half in a human body the [nearly] identical results are twins whereas if the same thing happens in a piece of glass one child becomes a clone, is not clear, but we are assured that technically, such is the case.) If people are so vainglorious they'd rather have duplicates instead of allowing themselves that joyous leap off the cliff called conceiving a child, so long as they are able to rear that baby to responsible adulthood, it should be their business. That the opportunities increase for the sorts of abuse such as comes out of projecting one's dreams on a child may be true, but ultimately I feel people must be responsible for their own behavior. It is not the part of others to make such decisions.
Clark doesn't agree. In her view, it's okay to study the human genome to discover, even alter, the gene (or genes) that causes cerebral palsy (under tight government controls, of course) but one strongly suspects that doing the research (what a dreadful dull statement) to be able to manipulate the genome, the way a violinist plays horsehair, varnished wood and gut, and for the same, creative, joyous reasons could only, in Clark's contained society of beautiful people, yield a dark side. Looseness, improv, play—these bohemian qualities, always suspected of corrupting the young, have no place. Good guys wear neat, conservative clothes and sensible shoes, and the women are always carefully groomed with shining hair and perfect makeup (except of course, when they're being chased down by killers or just had heart attacks). It's not just the clothes. For all the richness of the setting—New York City—one seldom gets a sense of the ethnic variety—of the people, their clothes, the buildings, their food, their customs, the dirt, or the buzzing cultural life.
A sculptor is good enough to a be mistress, but a nightclub singer in spangles and sequins is merely a divorcee who can't even be bothered to call her only child. I found the assumption troubling that a woman earning her bread deserved greater contempt than a man cheating his employers. (I've never had any difficulty, in Clark novels, in deciding which characters the author did and didn't like. Why this feeling is so strong, I can't say, but it is.) I suppose there are mothers that driven by their careers, but I couldn't help feeling that because a woman had made the difficult choice to put a career first—something that men, mind you, have been doing with impunity from the dawn of time—didn't mean she abruptly lost all feeling for her child.
But that, I've concluded, is perhaps the ultimate crime in a Mary Higgins Clark novel: one may have a successful career. One may, if one is the heroine, almost escape the clutches of the villain, because the man must be allowed to rescue one at the end. (Oddly enough, Heyer, writing in the 1930s, had her heroine, a mere 17 year old, married to the most powerful and protective of men, rescue herself handily from rape and disgrace with a poker.)
One can even be a heroine and help one's employer to the sensational story of one's own family's dirty laundry first (since they'll find out eventually anyway), an admittedly pragmatic attitude I nonetheless find a great deal more distasteful than singing in a tawdry nightclub. But a woman must never, never, never put anything or anyone but her children first. And, sorry, folks, I can't ultimately agree. I don't argue that there aren't wonderful depictions of parents’—of both sexes—supreme sacrifices for their progeny. But the underlying theme of this book, and by extension the ideal of American society that Clark projects in it, is that while men may live for themselves, ultimately, despite the progress our society has made for equality, women must still live for others. And I find that deeply troubling.
(But hey, let's face it, she's hardly alone. Lots of books I read make this assumption—it's only because this one is so good that it bothers me. Three stars.)
Originally created: 16aug98; minor grammar & spelling edits, 30dec2014; added feminism tag, 13apr2018
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
