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From The New York Times
Books of the Times
Crossing Europe, Packing Menace, Sex and Secrets
By JANET MASLIN
December 17, 2007
Darcy Arlen, straight out of Indian Bend, Ohio, is taking a six-week European tour courtesy of her parents, who gave her the trip to celebrate her high school graduation. As Craig Holden’s “Matala” begins to spread its dark wings, Darcy is an accident waiting to happen, despite her squeaky-clean schedule full of museums, opera, architecture and ruins.
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From The Wall Street Journal
By Tom Nolan
January 4, 2008
Never mind the cynics: Travel does indeed broaden the mind, but it still may not improve the character. There is a lot of travel in “Matala,” Craig Holden’s brief sixth novel, and a lot of mischief, which itself moves over the course of the story from mere deviousness to real danger.
The three principal figures in “Matala” meet in Rome in the late 1980s: 19-year-old Darcy, a rich American girl “barely out of high school and bored already with the whole word”; Will, a 22-year-old New England grifter, worldly wise but willfully clueless; and 39-year-old Justine, “a dark woman—hair, eyes, skin, soul.” Justine is Will’s English-born partner in the con games and fraud schemes that fund their aimless drift.
Justine and Will draw Darcy into their net. Together the trio goes from Rome to Venice, from Venice to Yugoslavia to Athens and thence to Crete: “the oldest Western civilization of them all.” As places shift and blend (Matala is a touristy Cretan village), so do perceptions. The story is told from different points of view, not all of them reliable.
It is in Venice that Will notes that he and his partner have badly “misjudged” the not-so-innocent Darcy. But Justine appears determined to follow a secret threat of her own into more exploitative deception. And the suggestible Will—seemingly shaped by others—may yet prove the most devious one of all.
“Matala” is told, in part, through flashbacks that add depth and heighten tension, although they also delay plausible motives behind key acts. In certain ways, the novel is a highbrow literary puzzle box. In others—like the finely observed sequences of violence, sexual intensity and betrayal—it is a suave sort of pulp fiction.
From the San Francisco Chronicle
The dead and the naked
By Eddie Muller
January 6, 2008
Craig Holden's Matala (Simon & Schuster; 192 pages; $22) reminds me of one of those sexy 1960s European movies, along the lines of Rene Clement's "Joy House." You know, beautiful young people wallowing in deceit and decadence amid gorgeous Mediterranean scenery. What's not to like? I see a young Jane Fonda - or even better, Hayley Mills - playing the role of Darcy Arlen, the young deb who becomes the fulcrum of the novel's dangerous three-way passion play.
Odd I should cite a '60s antecedent for a novel set in the '80s. That's probably because of the restrained way Holden spins his sordid story, which, though suffused with twisted sex games and warped psychology, remains remarkably tasteful.
Darcy is a spoiled American rich girl, bored with her Italian tour group, who breaks curfew to spend an evening with Will, a young Yank vagabonding his way across Europe. Before you can say menage À trois, Darcy is introduced to Justine (Durrell and De Sade fans, take note), a vaguely menacing 39-year-old Englishwoman who seems to have complete psychic control over young Will (let's see ... Helen Mirren? Oh, yeah).
What follows is a two-cats-on-one-mouse game that leads this trio across Italy and into a spiral of criminality and psychosexual depravity. In short, the European vacation we all dream about. Holden keeps the pages turning as we wonder who will hold the whip hand next, and he does an admirable job of tantalizing the reader by keeping the plot's big secret just out of view. But it's a good thing the book is short; the back-and-forth geometry of the setup couldn't have been sustained for another 40 or so pages.
Without giving anything away, I'll say that, for me, the ending failed. Holden gets stuck between giving readers a slam-bang climax and wanting to go out with something less cliched, more ambiguous. While I admire his taste, I wished Holden had given his finale more of that what-the-hell 1960s recklessness. The epilogue felt slightly too accommodating of contemporary notions of correctness.
From The Albuquerque Journal
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Tangled Tale of Seemingly Good Teenage Girl Gone Bad
By Review by David Steinberg
"Matala— a Novel of Deceit" by Craig Holden
Simon & Schuster, $22, 180 pp.
Think of "Matala" as a spider's web of a noir novel. The deeper you get into the story, the more you give in to the pull of its seductive strands.
The story opens with the seemingly naive American teenager Darcy Arlen wandering off from her tour group visiting cultural attractions in Rome.
Off on her own, Darcy meets a young man named Will on a bridge.
The casual meeting propels Darcy into an international underworld of drugs and other illicit trafficking.
Darcy, as we learn, isn't Miss Goody Twoshoes. A child of a well-off family in Ohio, Darcy is adept at shoplifting and petty thievery, and has been for years.
Tired of the tour's predictability and of its many art treasures, she is looking for a bit of devilment, and maybe even sex and trouble along the way.
Darcy finds all of that and more with Will and Justine.
Will is a foggy-headed twentysomething drifter who introduces her to his sometime lover, Justine, a 39-year-old grifter with higher criminal ambitions.
With each chapter, author Craig Holden brings the reader into the steps and missteps of the trio's lovemaking and the mysterious smuggling enterprise that involves the unknown contents of a package they're taking across Europe's borders.
At the same time, Holden peels back layers of back story into the past lives of this unsympathetic but intriguing threesome.
The title of this new novel comes from the name of a town on the island of Crete where the action has its dramatic and unexpected denouement.
The book's subtitle, "a novel of deceit," refers to the tricks of the criminal trade— and of the heart— each of the three main characters play on each other.
Holden is a master web spinner. And he happens to be a professor of creative writing and literature at New Mexico State University. Holden's previous novels include "The Jazz Bird," "The River Sorrow" and "The Narcissist's Daughter."
David Steinberg is the Journal Books editor and an Arts writer.
From Library Journal
Darcy, a rich, world-weary teenager on a European tour, meets Will, a boy she thinks she recognizes from her high school. Will, world weary in a different way-the down-on-your-luck kind-has been traveling for several years with Justine and has been schooled in the art of the scam. They con Darcy, separating her from her tour group, and through a series of circumstances, she becomes a part of their group, funding most of their travels. The older and more experienced Justine is the mastermind, but Darcy is easily her match intellectually. Holden's latest novel (after The Jazz Bird) is riddled with cat-and-mouse games between the two. Justine's shady connections in the drug world set up a situation that culminates in a life-threatening encounter, but the real story centers on the emotional void in each of the three characters and how their chance meeting sets them on the road to healing. Holden has written a fast-paced novel with compelling and complex characters. Some of the graphic sexual material is probably best suited to older readers. Recommended for large public libraries.
From Publishers Weekly
Matala
Craig Holden. Simon & Schuster, $22 (192p) ISBN 978-0-7432-7499-9
A couple of smalltime grifters are taken for a ride by the enticing young woman they choose as an easy mark in this nifty little page-turner from Holden (The Narcissist's Daughter). Young, beautiful and bored Darcy Arlen is in Rome on a group tour of Europe, a gift for her high school graduation. When she comes across young, good-looking Will staring pensively into the Tiber River, she's more than ready for an adventure. Will and his partner/lover Justine, 39, have been on the road for several years, living off small cons and thievery, into which she has initiated him. The duo sees Darcy as a lamb to be shorn, and soon enough the two separate her from her tour, and they all head to Venice and then on to the Greek island of Matala. It slowly becomes clear that Darcy is not the innocent everyone supposes her to be, and the plot morphs into con-man-conned territory. Holden cops out on a few promised revelations, but in the end everything falls nicely into place, adding up to a slick, sexy read. (Jan.)