David Carkeet

With one foot in farce and the other in realism, Carkeet dissects a modern marriage from a dispassionate but never disinterested viewpoint. Jeremy Cook, a lovelorn Ph.D. linguist, accepts a job with the mysterious Pillow Agency (founder: Roy Pillow), which "embeds" researchers in troubled marriages to try to save them. Cook, armed with only the vaguest instructions, is duly sent to live with a thirty-something couple in St Louis. Are their troubles based in language? Not really, although show more they seem to have as much trouble communicating as any other couple, and Cook's analyses of their conversation patterns can be surprisingly spot-on. Over the course of a week, the root of their problem is given a name, Cook's own most pressing problem is solved, and things are looking tentatively hopeful for all of them. But the journey there is full of episodes both hilarious and tense.

I doubt I've read a funnier book that wasn't complete nonsense. The stage is set early with Cook's absurd miscommunications with the bizarre Roy Pillow, and Beth Wilson's two-word answer to the boilerplate question "Who usually initiates sex?" almost had me on the floor. Yet while the pace never flagged, it never became wearying, and everything wrapped up at the end in as satisfying a way as a good meal. While I can't agree with Carkeet's analysis of "The Horror" at the bottom of every troubled marriage, I root for the Wilsons, wish Cook the best, and wish I could find more books like this. show less

The Library of America's newest Mark Twain omnibus included a sketch from this book—an apparently reincarnated Mark Twain visiting the present-day offices of the Mark Twain Papers in California, where his manuscripts are stored—that I found brilliant, so I searched for it. I've read many volumes of Twain, things written for publication and things not, and I have a pretty good feel for his distinctive voice. Carkeet nails it. The parts of "I Been There Before" that are supposed to have show more been written by Twain—mostly letters—are completely convincing, and their turns of phrases and sly jokes even made me laugh aloud, the way Twain himself so often manages to catch me by surprise.

The plot is interesting, too, as Twain comes to earth in a way that's as much as surprise to him as to anyone else, making his way handily through 1980s America, always one step ahead of (and in some ways behind) the academic investigators trying to track him down. There is an unfortunate subplot about a confidence man who falls in with Twain, then impersonates him, that overshadows the story of Twain himself. Because the story is told at a remove (mostly through the voices of the researchers, and through Twain's letters and sketches, which only give fragments of his experiences), the confusion is amplified and what should be the best parts of the story are obscured. In fact, I was so frustrated by the increasing farce of the impersonation story and by the mental hoops through which the narrative forced me to jump that I put the book down, not far from the end, and didn't pick it up again for over a month.

Twain's private life was always the weakest element of my knowledge of him, so I was fascinated by the light shed on his relationships with his older brother Orion (pronounced OR-i-on; who knew?) and daughters Susy and Jean. Although it was a frustrating reading experience, its high points were very high indeed, and I'd go so far as to call it a must-read for any Twain fanatic. show less

I don’t usually read academic mysteries; my actual experience as a college teacher provided me with more laughs and puzzles than the books could. But David Carkeet’s Double Negative, about a bunch of linguists studying the development of language in small children, is different. For one thing, these people are not in a college setting; they work in a day-care center that is also an observing laboratory called the Wabash Institute.
The main character here, Jeremy Cook, reminds me of show more Kingsley Amis’s comic hero in Lucky Jim. That book isn’t a mystery, but the title character is an academic type whose comic bumbling includes a disastrous speech before a group he despises. There’s a similar scene in this book.
Although they aren’t at a college, there’s still plenty of academic infighting among the linguists at the Wabash Institute, and at one point they all contemplate with horror the possibility that, if their funding dries up, they might have to teach. The local police lieutenant who comes to investigate the murders at Wabash regards with contempt the linguist’s jealousies and what he sees as their cowardly fear of judgment. Lieutenant Leaf is one of Carkeet’s more interesting characters—funny, shrewd, and full of odd expressions that continually surprise Jeremy Cook: “the whole boiling” is Leaf’s phrase for “the whole thing,” and at one point he says “the law can’t let everyone run around rantum-scantum,” meaning presumably “harum-scarum,” except that rantum-scantum is really an archaic expression for sexual intercourse, and I assume a little joke of the linguist author.
Some of the characters have names indicating their dispositions or habits: Jeremy’s friend, who is accident-prone, is named Ed Woeps; and the gossip-monger of the group, always asking you questions so that he has something to pass on to the next person, is named Aaskhugh.
The fear of judgment that Lieutenant Leaf despises in these academics is really a theme of the book. Carkeet explores personal likes and dislikes, the wish to be liked, and the flimsy, sometimes misguided reasons on which affections or aversions get formed. The mystery is finally solved when Jeremy figures out the private linguistic forms by which one toddler indicates the people he likes or dislikes. And the crimes begin with an accident turns into a hit-and-run because the driver is afraid of the public exposure his recklessness will bring. The book ends with the little group of linguists, their number reduced by one who was murdered and one who has been jailed for it, reexamining and trying to modify their judgments of each other. show less

Pop Quiz: What book has these plot points?

1. The unlikely protagonist is a quirky academic.
2. The protagonist works in a environment with an assortment of other quirky academics.
3. The protagonist's boss is a self-interested bore.
4. The protagonist has a love interest for whom there is a rival.
5. The protagonist is assigned by his boss to write and deliver a lecture that he does not wish to do.

If you answered Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim you would be absolutely correct. But, if you answered show more David Carkeet's "Double Negative" you would also be absolutely correct.

Although quirky academic characters and locales probably feature in dozens of novels, I read "Double Negative" with increasing enjoyment as the parallels kept falling into place and by the time of the assigned lecture I was firmly convinced that Carkeet was following Amis's overall "Lucky Jim" plot arc.

Instead of Amis's English university, Carkeet places his story at the fictional Wabash Institute in southern Indiana, USA. a combined child care facility and linguistic studies centre. The academics are linguists studying the speech of young children. "Double Negative" shares a mostly comic tone with "Lucky Jim" except for the murder mystery element.

There seemed to be a lot of plot points that weren't properly tied-up at the end so Carkeet doesn't really fit the model of genre mystery writer. Nevertheless, this was a very entertaining read made even more so by the between the lines homage to Kingsley Amis.

Notes
Quirky characters are one thing, but a lot of quirky names makes for a hard to follow book. I ended up doing my own cast of characters list to help out, so here it is for others if needed:

Wabash Institute
Walter Wach: administrator at the Wabash Institute
Mary: Secretary to Walter Wach
Jeremy (called Jay by some) Cook: linguist, protagonist of the story
Ed Woeps: linguist, Cook’s main friend at the Institute
Arthur Stiph: older linguist, sleeps often at the office
Emory Milke: linguist, romantic rival to Jeremy Cook
Adam Aaskhugh: linguist, gossips, snoops
Clyde Orffmann: linguist, laughs very loudly
Miss Pristam: linguist, out of town
Sally Good: chief caretaker (child care worker)
Paula Nouvelles: new caretaker, potential love interest of Jeremy Cook
various others

Non-Wabash Institute
Henry Philpot: journalist, researching a story on the Wabash Institute
Mrs. Adelle Stiph: wife of Arthur Stiph
Mrs. Helen Woeps: wife of Ed Woeps
Wally Woeps: 16-month old son of Ed & Helen Woeps, Jeremy Cook is doing a study of his speech
Amy Woeps: daughter of Ed & Helen Woeps
Lieutenant Leaf: Police detective

Stray Observations
• I did not notice the phrase "Double Negative" used at all in the book, but I assume its use in the title is meant as a reference to the two murders.
• The closest thing to "Lucky Jim"'s faces (Jim makes mock faces of other people behind their backs) seemed to be Jeremy Cook making odd phone calls with abrupt hangups.
• David Carkeet wrote two more books featuring linguist Jeremy Cook, The Full Catastrophe: A Novel and The Error of Our Ways, but they aren’t murder mysteries.
• Although the "Lucky Jim" inspiration isn't mentioned in the 1982 Penguin Crime edition, I found that the online "Discussion Questions" by Overlook Press for the 2010 edition http://www.overlookpress.com/rg/doublenegative.pdf has this to say:
"The author has acknowledged his debt to three books that influenced the writing of Double Negative. One is Learning How To Mean: Explorations In The Development Of Language, a scholarly monograph by British linguist M.A.K. Halliday, who studied “idiophenomena” in his toddler son just as Cook studied them in Wally. Another is Peter Dickinson’s The Poison Oracle, a mystery about linguistic research in a primate center. The third is Kingsley Amis’ classic comic novel, Lucky Jim. You might know Dickinson’s or Amis’ novels. If so, can you point to similarities between them and Double Negative?" show less