Book Review: For Your Benefit
For Your Benefit. Patrick Canning, Independent, August 2024, paperback and e-book, 261 pages.
Reviewed by William Pitsenberger.
A MacGuffin, Britannica AI helpfully explains, is “a plot device that drives the story and motivates characters, though it’s ultimately insignificant to the narrative. It can be an object, event, or character that triggers the plot, typically appearing in the first act.” Frequently cited examples of a MacGuffin are the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction, Hammett’s Maltese falcon, and Kane’s dying word, Rosebud, in Citizen Kane. Alfred Hitchcock described it as “the thing that the characters on screen worry about, but the audience don’t [sic] care.”
For Your Benefit, the latest novel from Patrick Canning, a current Chicago resident, is driven by a whopper of a MacGuffin, the search by the brothers who make up the Lint Detective Agency for Royal Jelly. .
Depending on who describes it, Royal Jelly may be a radioactive form of Agent Orange stowed away since the Vietnam war, an unseen force inhibiting equality, or a pansexual DJ from Dublin who’s addicted to painkillers.
The calm center of a cast crowded with sketchy Boy Scouts, a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of Seabees, secretive societies and an advertising executive intent on world domination is Teddy Lint. Both he and his “brother” (the term is non-biological; they were both survivors of a cult that held them captive as youths) Ralph are well-developed characters - Teddy is the kindest of detectives whose greatest asset (“I like people”) gives him readier access to leads than Ralph.
The novel kicks off when the Lints are hired by a man posing as a CIA agent, accompanied by Tom Hanks (there only to provide nonthreatening credibility on a pay-per-hour basis). The supposed agent gives the brothers a deadline: one week to find the Royal Jelly before hundreds of crop-dusting drones spray Los Angeles with it. That deadline launches the detectives on a hectic journey across L.A. chasing tenuous leads involving a feminist group intent on establishing a world ruled by women, a restaurant serving meals made from endangered species, a group of pranksters called the Bacallian Order (after Lauren Bacall), and yet another order, the Janussians, headed by a soap opera star, that hosts a bacchanalian party in an unmapped country club in the middle of Los Angeles.
This is a novel from an unrestrained imagination that mixes over-the-top characters worthy of Carl Hiassen’s Florida with more than a few convoluted Pynchonesque conspiracies. At times it can seem overloaded with loose connections from one bizarre scenario to another, a surfeit of absurd situations and people, to the point of trying the reader’s patience.
Still, in keeping with the MacGuffin concept, it is the journey more than the object sought that carries the reader along, a carnivalesque and often slapstick adventure. Both Lint brothers are changed men by the end of the novel, and although there is something slightly unsatisfying and abrupt about the path Teddy ultimately chooses, it is in the broadest sense in keeping with his belief that there is some good in everyone
