Total Control
by David Baldacci

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Book Reviews of Total Control

Book Review: 16 Year Old Suddenly Writes Book, Makes Millions!
Summary: 1 Stars

Baldacci has Inspector Clousseau's eye for detail. In one early scene on page 85, two characters meet at the site of an airplane crash, and Baldacci sets a new record for cramming the most inconsistencies into a single paragraph. Baldacci describes the daylight as "rapidly failing," but Lee Sawyer shows up wearing sunglasses, perhaps because in Baldacci's junior-high world on-duty cops are required to wear sunglasses at all times. George Kaplan "freezes" when he sees Sawyer then squints to try to make out who that person is a "bare five feet away." I can usually identify people from 5 feet away, but then again, I don't squint to see in the dark; I open my eyes wider. When Sawyer steps forward, Kaplan is able to identify him--from about two feet away by my reckoning--which is probably pretty good for someone who's squinting in the dark.

Baldacci attended the Archie Bunker school of word choice, and selects his words more for what they sound like than what they mean. He has characters "alight into" a car. (You can't alight "into" a car; you can only alight "out of" a car.) Kaplan squints in the "rapidly failing" light. "Failing?" How about "fading?" On page 378 (which is almost as dense with hilarious inconsistencies as page 85), Baldacci reports that "a twitch erupted over Sidney's left eye." A twitch can't erupt. A twitch is minor. A "spasm" could erupt. How about just writing "Her left eyelid twitched?" Later, "Sidney struggled mightily not to perceptibly wince at the remark." Aside from the split infinitive, I think it would be as easy to notice a woman "struggling mightily" as to notice her wincing "perceptibly." Still further down the page, "Sidney felt herself trembling." What's does Baldacci mean by that? Did she reach out with one hand and feel the other hand trembling, or did she "notice" rather than "feel" that she was trembling? Throughout the book, most things happen "suddenly" as in "Steve suddenly criticized Baldacci's book on amazon.com."

The book is written almost exclusively in the passive voice. The sentence construction is truly impressive in that you would never think it was possible to twist certain words into a passive formation: "Sidney's legs were put by her into the front of the car." Weird things happen with people's legs throughout the book. Lee Sawyer walks on "telephone pole size legs" (presumably Baldacci is referring to thickness, not length). In one scene, Baldacci says "Sidney's legs began walking down the street." (We never learn where the rest of her went in that particular scene.)

This book requires the reader to suspend his or her disbelief, and in that it excels. You will be able to practice suspending your disbelief in laws of physics, human nature, business practices, legal procedings, police procedure, modern computing, and virtually every other topic Baldacci addresses.

After reading the first 10 pages, I was surprised that the book had been published at all. After the first 50, I kept reading for the amusement of seeing characters that were so silly and a plot that was so contrived -- and because other people on the airplane had taken all the more literary reading material, such as Seventeen and Tiger Beat magazines.

After 250 pages, I squinted my eyes and suddenly became convinced that Baldacci was 15 or 16 years old. The author changes voice and tense frequently, but mostly writes in third person omniscient. Readers are given full access to every thought every character in the book has for the duration of the adventure, and most of those are at the junior high level. If you read the book as a description of junior high school students role playing attorneys, FBI agents, computer programmers, and so on, it actually makes a lot of sense. Reinforcing my guess, Baldacci's word choices are mostly at about the 5th grade level, but every 3 or 4 pages he throws in a word like "brook," as in "Sidney's telephone-pole sized legs would brook no thought of walking down the street." I concluded that Baldacci was studying for the SAT as he wrote this book and worked in a lot of the words from his SAT study guide.

I didn't make it all the way to the ending, but I imagine it ends something like this:

Sidney's eyelids were made to coolly squint at the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. "Miranda Shmiranda," she extemporized. Her hand suddenly slapped the Chief Justice on the lower left side of his cheek. The Chief Justice immediately froze and winked with pain. "That will show him to deny my appeal," she thought to herself, smacking her gum as her legs walked down Wall Street and off into the sunset.

Summary of Total Control

Literature & Fiction Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction
• Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery
• Thrillers > Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue
• Suspense