We're So Vain
A killer targets Boston’s beauties in this medical thriller.
Skin Deep, by Gary Braver (Forge Books; New York; 2008; 448 pages; $24.95)
By Magdalena Hernandez
In America, the lust for physical reinvention goes manicured hand in glove with the eager dream of upward mobility. Has any culture ever worshiped more fervently at the altar of self-improvement?
For his latest novel, English professor Gary Goshgarian takes this national obsession and gives it a creepy nip and tuck. In Skin Deep, his fourth book under the pen name Gary Braver, someone is stalking beautiful devotees of plastic surgery. Vanity has become lethal to Boston’s lookers.
It takes homicide detective Steve Markarian a while to see the connection. First, an exotic dancer turns up dead. Despite the evidence, Markarian doesn’t buy that she perished accidentally during an autoerotic act.
Then more women die. Possible suspects abound, from the detective’s own partner to a college professor. Everyone has seamy secrets to hide.
Markarian is a likable gumshoe, but—true to the genre—his flaws are threatening to do him in. He mixes antianxiety medication with alcohol, and has blackouts. He’s unhappily separated from his wife, Dana.
Meanwhile, Dana, a teacher seeking a new career, is convinced her age and her looks are holding her back. She decides to get plastic surgery, scoring an appointment with one of Boston’s top plastic surgeons.
As Markarian gathers information about the murders, he finds cause to worry that Dana could become the next victim. Most disturbing of all: He begins to believe he could be the killer. With his blackouts, there’s so much he can’t remember.
Intertwined with the detective story, a second plot follows a young boy and his relationship with his stepmother, Lila, a gorgeous aspiring actress. Her tragic childhood and floundering film career serve up plenty of reverberating instability for the pair.
Despite its serious themes, Skin Deep takes readers on a fun ride. The plot is engrossing; the characters are credible and sympathetic. What’s more, the book is loaded with backdrops knowledgeable Huskies will instantly recognize.
For instance, one character’s favorite haunt is Conor Larkin’s, the Huntington Avenue pub. And Northeastern’s Churchill Hall is the site of the office of Markarian’s mentor, a criminal-justice professor named Jacqueline Levini.
Name sound familiar? Wait, here’s another clue—she’s described as having “a frizzy head of salt-and-pepper hair that looked as if it had been styled by Albert Einstein.”
For those still drawing a blank, it’s more than a little possible Levini was inspired by real-life Northeastern sociology and criminology professor Jack Levin, an expert on murder and serial killers. (Keep an eye out for the Einstein frizz next time a high-profile murder is discussed on TV.)
In truth, all the novel’s characters seem drawn from real life. Markarian, in particular, emerges as fully realized and sympathetic. His earnest struggles with chemical dependency and his love for Dana encourage the reader to root for him.
The story has believable psychological underpinnings. There are several suspenseful plot twists. In addition, though the killer’s identity will be apparent to some readers early on, the motive behind the murders proves a satisfying shocker.
All this adds up to a page turner. Compared with earlier Braver novels—which hew closer to science fiction, with action revolving around magic elixirs or fantastic surgical procedures—Skin Deep is a genuine thriller in the believable here and now.
Along the way, it grapples with serious themes. The story warns of the dangers of our youth-obsessed, values-challenged era. Yet it doesn’t shy away from exploring the advantages of plastic surgery, either.
Women are rewarded for an attractive and youthful appearance, the novel acknowledges. Humans have responded to a beautiful face since time immemorial. The author weaves in an interesting discussion of the “golden ratio,” a formula that attempts to quantify the universal ideal of physical beauty.
And the book suggests that plastic surgery can aid in the quest for self-realization. As one character notes, “People identify with their appearance. They become how they look.”
However, the gender bias inherent in plastic surgery comes in for its share of frank criticism, too. As Dana observes, “Women never stop posing, and men never stop re-creating them. . . . Instead of a couch, today it’s an operating table. Instead of a paintbrush . . . a scalpel. Meanwhile, the woman is nothing more than material to be refashioned.”
In many ways, the novel reveals, those who undergo plastic surgery are attempting to erase their past, an impossible goal. They’re also trying to avoid confronting their mortality. “If people can’t live forever, they can at least look younger longer,” one character notes.
The central irony here, of course, is a killer who targets plastic-surgery patients. In Skin Deep, taking steps to look younger means you might just meet your end a little more precipitously.
Beneath the surface of the novel lies a layered commentary on a culture hooked on appearances. Rather than work on internal problems, people seek shortcuts to self-improvement. Dana, for instance, goes under the knife rather than work through her marital and midlife angst.
Tellingly, many characters are emotionally scarred, often as a result of broken homes. Markarian hesitates to start a family because his parents were “people so self-absorbed, so pathologically malcontent that they were incapable of raising him without passing on their own damage.” Lila, a victim of an abusive father, becomes an inappropriate stepmom in a falling-apart family.
Self-perceptions get twisted by parental failures. The early damage continues to ripple through the generations, upending relationships and wrecking homes.
But cycles can be broken, as Markarian’s story arc demonstrates. Not surprisingly, his self-acceptance doesn’t depend on Botox and tummy tucks.
Searching for new and improved selves via plastic surgery, Skin Deep shows, is an empty act. We’re shaped by family and experience in ways that—for better or worse—the best nose job can’t begin to fix.
In the end, the ultimate makeover comes when we’re ready to take a look at our ugliest inner demons.
Magdalena Hernandez, MBA’02, is a senior editor.
Bookmarks
Serial Killers and Sadistic Murderers: Up Close and Personal, by Jack Levin; Prometheus Books; 2008
No expert understands the American psycho better than Jack Levin (take a look at the preceding book review for one example of how pervasive his authority has become). Here, the Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology weighs in on some of crime’s most notorious cases—from the Hillside Strangler to Jeffrey Dahmer—to plumb the psyches of those who kill.
Levin offers a keen dissection of the razor-sharp capacity for planning these sociopaths display. Most interestingly, he reveals what it was like to meet many of them and discusses how authorities might stop murderous rampages in the future.
Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, compiled and edited by Peter Orner; McSweeney’s; 2008
Living under the radar by necessity, undocumented immigrants are often easy scapegoats, blamed for taking jobs away from citizens, sapping social services, boosting crime rates.
Undocumented America, a compilation of oral histories edited by Peter Orner, L’96, shows another side of this story: the undocumented men and women who risk everything for a shot at a better life in the United States, hold down jobs no American would take, fall prey to forced labor or human trafficking.
The tales, which are uniformly riveting and sometimes heart-rending, form a mosaic of the immigrant experience. Orner performs a service with this volume by putting human faces on a complex issue.