WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

A young man meticulously plans a yearslong plot to avenge his mother’s abuse at the hands of a powerful political figure.

Marci Davis is on the fast track to success. The Louisville native is among the first African American women to earn a degree from the University of Kentucky in the 1950s. She becomes a “key aide” to the state’s governor, Bentley Wellington, but this comes to an end after he brutally rapes and impregnates her. She moves to New Jersey to start a new life, even changing her name to Marci Davis Jeffries. Much later, in 1975, she tells her son, Sean, the truth about his conception, and he devotes himself to exacting revenge on his mother’s behalf. His plan is exasperatingly convoluted, however, which is typical of Hilliard’s meandering, ill-disciplined narrative. It involves Sean’s acquiring “an intimate working knowledge of the thoroughbred racing industry” in order to strike at the Wellingtons’ most successful holdings, “one of the premier breeding operations in the nation.” Even when the Wellington business empire falls on hard times, the breeding business is still a shining success, although Beau Bentley, Sean’s half brother, threatens to destroy it himself through his illegal financial dealings. Meanwhile, Jorge Hauptmann, one of Sean’s friends, discovers that the father who abandoned him as a child, Fabian, worked undercover against the Nazis during World War II and that his mother, Gretchen, was a Nazi collaborator. Jorge is reunited with his dad after Fabian learns that Gretchen is under threat from a “domestic far-right-wing political group with neo-Nazi elements.” These two seemingly incongruent storylines eventually intersect in a thoroughly unbelievable manner. Hilliard’s literary ambition is certainly impressive. Over the course of this book, he constructs a generationally sweeping tale and attempts to bind its disparate parts together with a single overarching theme: the corrosive power of family secrets. However, the story is excessively and frustratingly complex—there are far too many subplots, and the author’s seemingly endless cast of characters becomes a burden to the reader. As a result, the novel reads like a collection of short stories that seem to be connected by only the slightest of threads. Also, the author practically buries the reader under mountains of detail that are incidental to the story at hand. At one point, for example, he provides the biographies of a company’s board members; later on, he describes, with excruciating thoroughness, an official document that must be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. To make matters worse, the prose doesn’t generate any feelings of authentic passion; instead of a vibrant human drama, it feels more like a still-life painting. This passage from a sex scene, for instance, somehow manages to be simultaneously lurid and mechanical: “ ‘Give it to me hard!...Piledrive me!...Ahhhhhhh!’ And then it was over. The sexual fireworks he’d just experienced set a really high bar for the pyrotechnics to come outside.”

A plodding and confusing story that’s hampered by a lack of believability and awkward prose.