Killing Lanna

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Read the first sentence in Leon Whiteson’s first novel and you realize
immediately that you are in the presence of insanity. Whiteson’s
first-person protagonist, Allan Crane, says, in the opening line,
“I’ve decided to kill the woman I love, the only person I’ve ever
really loved, or ever will love.” The second sentence is still more
prophetic (and crazy): “I’ve decided to kill my wife because I love
her; because, in the end, it seems the only way to cherish her truly.”
And on it goes. And the novel’s failure is imbedded in this madness,
because the insanity is there at the beginning and there is no reason
for it except Crane’s homicidal misogyny masquerading as love.

Whiteson’s writing is clear and, at times, finely crafted. And his
descriptions—in particular, of California both south and north—are
well written. But the central characters—holed up as they are in a
Sequoia cabin, drinking their tequila sunrises, and getting more and
more obsessive and paranoid—provide no justification for their
morbidity. There is no Lear-like descent into the darkness of insanity,
no gradual extinguishment of reality: just a portrait of a sick mind
intent on murder, with no reason other than the sickness itself for
carrying out the deed.

Whiteson has triumphed in the past with his nonfiction. He coauthored
the well-received A Place Called Waco (1999), and was nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize for The Watts Towers of Los Angeles (1989).