Mind+Body is a modern thriller very reminiscent of the movie version of The Bourne Identity. At times, it does not suffer from the comparison. At other times, it does.
The story is told first person, past tense by Chris Baker, a typical 17-year-old living with his family in a quiet suburb about an hour’s drive from the fabled Quantico. His father is a Marines research scientist, and dies of an apparent heart attack on the day the story begins. A few days after the funeral, Chris finds out his father had mysteriously tripled his life insurance policy several weeks before his death, and had made Chris the beneficiary of $500,000 of it. A few days later still, shortly after returning to school, Chris accidentally bumps into a trio of thugs who then threaten and commence to beat him up. At some point during the fight, something "clicks" in Chris’s mind, and seconds later all three attackers are incapacitated, and Chris only barely manages to reel it back in before he takes out the school police officer who comes to break up the fight.
Things get weirder from there.
Like Jason Bourne, Chris is a quick thinker, and endlessly inventive in a modern MacGyver kind of way. As he starts to poke and prod into the growing weirdness in his life—a choice that brings lots of action and danger—he has to think, con, and fight his way into and out of all sorts of jams. He is helped along the way by Amy, a friend from school, who becomes as interested as him in the mystery surrounding him and what happened to his father.
Mind+Body is at its best when Chris and Amy are together, gleefully getting into trouble, or dealing with the consequences. There was a point, somewhere in the middle of the story, where I truly couldn’t put it down. It was that involving. But, then, there are other chapters—almost invariably when Chris is alone—that the novel devolves into long monologues summarizing past events, detailing irrelevant mundanities, and musing on about What It All Means. These chapters, while still readable because of the consistently engaging voice, feel somewhat lifeless, and mostly unnecessary.
The novel itself begins with what I can only conclude is a mistake: it tells you how things will turn out. It’s an engaging hook, at the time—especially since a fair amount of lack-lustre backstory follows—but when in the thick of the events he summarized at the beginning, a lot of the potential tension never materializes, because you already know exactly how the chase is going to end. Additionally, there are several chapters—one in particular—where there are long, subtext-less conversations discussing What It All Means. Reliable or not, these chapters are frustrating to read—especially considering they immediately follow some very sharp action scenes. To return to the Bourne comparison: Jason figures out things a tiny bit at a time, and conversations about backstory never last more than twenty or thirty seconds. There’s a reason for that.
Because of all of this—and because a few key plot points felt rather hard for someone of Chris’s perceptiveness to miss—I found the ending to be rather unsatisfying—anti-climactic, in fact. The story wound down in the closing chapters, never coming to a sharp, demanding point. From the afterword, it’s seems likely the author had philosophical reasons for this dramatic curve, but the key to all fiction is to tell a good story first, and the ending didn’t—for me, at least—live up to what the novel promised in the chapters before.
In the end, I feel conflicted about Mind+Body. Large chunks of it are sharp, well-written, and very entertaining. And large chunks are just passable. The key to enjoying it is probably to manage your expectations: I think you’ll find it’s best in the middle. As long as you are okay with that, and you don’t take its philosophical meanderings too seriously, I think you’ll find Mind+Body to be a fun ride.
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