Famous After Death

When we meet him, our narrator is in prison, about to be interviewed by Barbara Walters. He is "the Wordsworth Bomber," a consumer advocate whose hatred of shoddy merchandise prompted him to take extreme and bloody measures. This, his life story, is told through diary excerpts, letters, and a book project, and topped off with a trick ending that's the literary equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. All of which makes for entertaining reading, except for one insurmountable problem: The narrator is a cipher. He needs to be, to make the ending work, but that means depriving the reader of any real sense of the antihero as a person (we never even know what he looks like, except he says he's fat). And that means that when the rabbit finally appears, instead of provoking gasps of surprise, he's met with tepid applause. B