I should have known.

Months ago, back on May 4th — OK, OK, I know that it was really just two weeks ago, but it feels like months — I was watching Greater Boston on Channel 2, as one does, and Jim Braude was interviewing Ben Mezrich about his new serial novella, The Mechanic, that was just starting in the Boston Globe and would run serially, a chapter or two a day for 15 days. I decided to give it a chance. I made it through ten of the 15 days.

I should have known.

The tell was Mezrich’s comment to Braude about admiring Dan Brown: his story was “Dickens by way of Dan Brown.” Since Brown is the worst writer ever to make it to the top of the best-sellers lists, we have to respond by saying “I know Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens was a friend of mine. You’re no Charles Dickens, Dan.” And neither is Mezrich.

I wrote about Mezrich 15 years ago — and it really was 15 years, it’s not just that I’m feeling that way — in connection with his supposedly non-fiction book, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, which was the basis of the movie 21. In my review, I presciently remarked that “Mezrich too often writes like an advocate of the Dan Brown school of writing.” I thought I was just making a snide comment; little did I know that Mezrich really is an advocate of Dan Brown’s writing!

I should have known.

Anyway, The Mechanic starts out in a somewhat promising way, with a young woman counting cards in the Encore Casino in Everett. In a nice twist, even if an unoriginal one, she turns out be a PhD candidate in applied math at MIT. We subsequently get a mixture of Whitey Bulger, the Gardner Museum theft, and so forth. It starts out being almost readable, but by the time it became completely unreadable ten days later I had had enough and gave up.

Categories: Books, Dorchester/Boston