Sometimes You're Not In Good Hands

Sometimes You're Not In Good Hands-- A Review of Bentley Little's The Policy

01/17/2005

Bentley Little. The Policy. New York: Signet, 2003. 389 p.

In a sense, Bentley Little is eternally writing the same novel. The Policy, his 14^th to date, follows the pattern of his other novels in that it dramatizes the horror of modern living as controlled by hoards of nameless, faceless corporate and government entities, be they universities (University), the post office (The Mailman), Wal-Mart (The Store), or gated communities that are tightly run by tyrannical neighborhood associations (The Association). While I would normally denounce as a hack anyone who seems to return to the same theme continuously, I hold a soft spot in my heart for Little's work as he confronts very real horrors seldom dealt with in a genre that frequently revels in stock monsters.

In The Policy, average people who inhabit what is supposed to be the wealthiest culture on the planet find their lives diminished rather than enriched by their environment, for with great prosperity and technological advancement comes the perhaps unreasonable expectation of inhabiting a world free of risk. Because of this, we have come to depend on insurance as a way of indemnifying the individual (and the corporate world) against loss. After all, banks require mortgage holders to purchase homeowner's policies to insure that their vaults will be lined if the individual's largest asset is destroyed. States require licensed drivers to have liability insurance to protect others against financial harm in case of a car accident. And those without health insurance will have great difficulty finding a physician willing to treat them, or find an emergency room willing to give them care, since it is likely that they will be unable to pay the enormous bill.

But what is supposed to protect us against loss, and thus make us freer, has in fact further enslaved us. Hunt Johnson, The Policy's protagonist, observes:

People stay at jobs they hate just for the insurance, especially if they have kids. It affects everything. I think more dreams are derailed because of the practical necessity of having insurance than anything else. . . . How many more people would be writing music if they didn't have to make those car insurance payments, if they didn't need homeowner's insurance? How many more people would be writing novels that are locked in their heads if they didn't need to work a job that guaranteed them health insurance for their kids?

But very soon, people realize that giving themselves up to the mundane slavery that pays for what has become as necessary as food and shelter is in vain, as insurance policies invariably contain exceptions to coverage, hidden in the fine print. The hapless insured discovers it is necessary after all to pay out of pocket to be made whole. Hunt and his friends all discover that their various insurance companies have a very different idea of what it means to replace something with another of equal value, or about what is a necessary medical procedure versus what is cosmetic. When Hunt's apartment is burglarized, the company that holds his renter's policy arranges to have an adjuster come in and replace his missing and damaged items with things of equal value, but these aren't necessarily the items he would have chosen. His damaged white walls are painted black. His collection of jazz and eclectic folk and rock CDs are replaced with multiple copies of Debbie Boone's "You Light Up My Life." And his library of tapes and books is replaced with hardcore pornography and Nazi propaganda. And when his wife develops dental problems, she's sent to see the only dentist authorized by their plan, one who drugs her and replaces her ailing tooth with a full set of metal teeth. This procedure is condoned by the insurance company, which describes it as preventative maintenance. Performing a root canal and capping the ailing tooth was out of the question, as that procedure is defined as "cosmetic" by their policy.

And then there's Murphy's Law, which dictates that one will be without coverage when one needs it most. Soon after Hunt and his friends discover that their coverage has left them short, they are visited by a mysterious insurance agent who attempts to sell them increasingly more bizarre policies to maintain their quality of life. First, the agent just wants to sell them riders to their homeowner's insurance or health coverage. But increasingly, the mysterious agent, who resembles the archetypical door to door salesman (complete with homburg), offers policies for things that can't be controlled, such as legal insurance that protects against being convicted of a crime, or employment insurance that guarantees the policy holder will never lose his or her job, become dissatisfied with it, or become the victim of office politics. When Hunt finds himself arrested on a spurious child molestation charge, the nameless agent comes to him in jail and offers him this legal insurance. After signing the contract, Hunt's accuser dies suddenly, and all copies of her videotaped testimony, the only evidence the district attorney has to prosecute him, disappear. Later, when Hunt's job is threatened, the agent offers him employment insurance: the result is that Hunt's immediate supervisor falls through his own roof and ends up in a coma, while the board of directors who want to eliminate his department suddenly find themselves embroiled in a sex scandal and must resign immediately. Ultimately, the agent appears to Hunt once again to offer him a special kind of life insurance, one that will literally protect him against death or bodily harm.

But these policies come with a terrible price. While Hunt is in jail, he meets a man who was also approached by this mysterious agent to purchase the strange policies. But when he became unable to keep up with the payments, he too found himself in jail accused of a crime he didn't commit, the culmination of string of other calamities. The next day, this man is conveniently killed by a fellow prisoner. Hunt also comes to realize that the mysterious agent is an agent in another sense as well--he's a provocateur capable of making bad things happen to those who refuse to purchase protection from him. But the agent is something far more sinister than a mere wiseguy committing extortion through making a person "an offer he can't refuse." This agent knows the most personal details of his potential clients lives and can suddenly appear in dwellings at will, can cause once solid trees to crash through roofs, can bring about miscarriages and cause teeth to abscess. It is this realization that causes Hunt and his friends to investigate the agent's infernal identity and cancel the policies.

Little's writing bridges the nexus between a complex and terrifying world where individuals are manipulated by corporate culture and the sort of supernatural abilities that these organizations derive as their power increases. The result is a sort of post-modernist magical realism, where people from a more primitive culture collide with those from a more advanced one whose ways are unintelligible to them. The resulting collision can only be described through supernatural agency. In regular magical realism, the reader is part of that more advanced culture whose contact with those more primitive forever alters it. But in post-modern magical realism, the reader is cast in the position of member of the more primitive culture whose collective wisdom has no frame of reference for comprehending the actions of the far more sophisticated corporate entity.

And perhaps this is why the best of Little's writing is able to provoke that rare emotion among hard core horror fans--fear. For truly, what is frightening to 21^st century inhabitants of the modern world? Ghosts, vampires and the reanimated dead are amusing, and often carry deep cultural significance, but they aren't really scary, since we all know that these things don't exist. However, who among us hasn't had an unsettling experience with a nameless, faceless bureaucracy who knows entirely too much about us and has a mind-boggling amount of power to shape our lives? I am far more fearful of someone pulling a trip and fall on my property and filing a bogus claim with my homeowner's insurance, thus getting my policy cancelled, than I am about mysterious noises in the night being caused by otherworldly beings who previously inhabited my 104 year old house. Perhaps Little's next novel should be about the IRS, although endowing them with supernatural powers would be merely redundant.