Skin in the Game’ plays weak cliches

• LIVINGSTON PRESS

Most of us know someone that gets excited about the new action thriller crime drama blockbuster flick and a few us even get suckered into watching those type of movies with them. Even though you know it’s going to suck, you watch it anyway and find, painfully, that it sucked as much as you expected. You should introduce that friend to Skin in the Game, the debut novel from R.P. Finch, which shares more than a few lamentable clichés with bad Hollywood films.

This book has everything your friend probably loves: an awkward, bumbling protagonist with a street smart, comic relief sidekick, scheming lawyers, a love interest subplot, strippers, the CIA and the mob.

All these factions come together as the main character, Eben Burnham - a young lawyer working at his family’s firm - aims to develop, with the help of his physics professor friend, technology that constructs computers to run on the laws of quantum physics. Quantum physics plays a big role in the novel, as Eben is an amateur physics buff. The references to physics and how Eben integrates their principles into understanding his daily life starts out interesting, but is overdone and, adding little to the development of the character or the plot, makes the story drag.

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There are many characters that emerge in the novel, but very few break out of the cliché roles that you’ve seen in a hundred straight to TV movies. Maybe the biggest culprit of earning eye rolls is Wolf, Eben’s officemate who is at the law firm through an outreach program called Ex Machina that guides “gang youths” through law school and helps them find a job at a firm. Faith in Wolf is lost early in the book when he is on a date with girl who is skeptical of his intentions and he says, “Can’t a guy ask a smokin’ hot gal out for a drink without something being up?” Haunting recollections of the movie Cool as Ice may stir every time Wolf speaks.

It’s difficult to determine during what year the book is set. The characters have cell phones and email, but out-of-date language that permeates the book. The word “memo” is used to excess and one can only assume that “memo” is still used in law firms, even though it hasn’t been used anywhere else since around 1998. Another example is while on a date at his love interest’s brownstone, Eben tries to overcome his discomfort as they sit down for drinks:

“Martinis, they’re the best!” he called from the leather sofa, although, in order to maximize his ability to catch social cues obscured behind facial expressions, he wasn’t a drinker.

She joined him, showing him skin stretched white over both patellas when she sat, plus several centimeters of thigh. And as she placed the martini glasses on the coffee table he noticed that her dress was doing a good job accentuating what was called the ‘bustline in contrast to the ‘midriff.’

It’s not clear whether the language is meant to reflect Eben’s immature thought process or if it’s how Finch has chosen to narrate the book. What is clear is that most all females are introduced with an assessment of their attractiveness, or a comment of their breast size. Sexual innuendoes are rampant and most fall short of their comedic intent.

Skin in the Game might entertain those that are entertained by cursory action crime dramas with limp humor, but readers looking for authors that are attempting to move literature forward using a fine tuned, highly practiced technique to do so, should pass on this.