Often, our feelings about a character are pretty straightforward: we love them, we like them, we dislike them, or we hate them. Successfully creating a mixture of these emotions can be a challenge, although many of the best authors seem to pull it off. Within this challenge, one of the hardest things for a writer to accomplish is making a character which we love to hate. It’s even harder to change our feelings about that character over the course of a novel, yet that is exactly what William H. Coles does with the protagonist of McDowell. That is why today’s review will be focused on this novel.
McDowell by William H. Coles follows the rise and fall of Hiram McDowell, a renowned American surgeon and philanthropist. McDowell has spent years meticulously building his career and life. He has founded a hospital for the underprivileged in Nepal, has climbed some of the world’s tallest mountains (including Mt. Everest), and has navigated the world of healthcare politics with hardly a scratch to his reputation. All of this and he manages to financially provide for an ever-growing family. However, everything is not what it seems. Beneath his public persona, McDowell is not the saint he would like everyone to believe. Adultery, broken promises, weakened family ties and friendships, McDowell seems to have sacrificed every relationship in his life in favor of his own pleasure and career advancements. Little does McDowell know, karma has a way of catching up with everyone.
At the beginning of the novel, McDowell is rapidly approaching the peak of his career. He is nationally recognized and considered to be one of the best, if not the best, in his field. He can travel all over the country and the world,fulfilling his lust for adventure and women while also using his skills as a surgeon to help the less fortunate. Now the ultimate honor is in sight: a seat on the President’s cabinet. Then disaster strikes, ripping his entire family apart and leading McDowell toward financial ruin. Thus begins McDowell’s slide down a slippery slope into anger, deceit, and even felonies. Can anything redeem this ambitious, self-centered man? Or is he doomed to forever be ignorant of his own wrongdoings?
I can genuinely say that I have never come across a novel quite like this one Coles has written. Coles has created something incredibly complex, not only inits plot and characters but in the emotions which it evokes. I began the novel absolutely despising McDowell and, for much of the book, I remained that way. However, little by little, Coles complicates my feelings for the character, sometimes thinking that there is a slim possibility for redemption and other times thinking that a man like him can never change. By the end, my feelings for McDowell landed somewhere in between like and dislike. He started as a character I loved to hate and ended a character I truly cared about, although I know he is not innocent of all wrongdoing and would not want to socialize with someone like him real life.
The outstanding character development does not end with McDowell. Almost every character, including secondary characters, are well-rounded with extraordinary depth. Coles even hints at backstories for characters which only appear for a handful of chapters, and many of these characters are not what they seem to beat first glance. From Paige, the hard-hitting and truth-focused journalist, and Sophie, McDowell’s artistic and bisexual daughter with a heart of gold, to Rosenthal, Paige’s sexist and ageist new boss, McDowell has a wide cast of characters which seems to include samples of people from every walk of life. No one is perfect, and only one character can be considered “pure”. Everyone else is fueled to some degree by self-interest and, in some cases, revenge; even those characters with the best of intentions cannot be considered completely innocent.
At 472 pages long, one would think that the story would run into superfluous events or lagging in the storytelling. However, the plot proves to be both gripping and intricate, weaving events and characters together so tightly that one change or omission could cause the whole thing to fall apart. Everything Coles writes contributes directly to either character development or plot—usually both—and is all necessary for the novel to have such a powerful impact on the reader. Fortunately, Coles’s style is so compelling and crisp that one can read through a hundred pages without realizing how much time has passed. If it had not been for other commitments, I probably would not put the book down until I was finished.
It is only fair to warn my readers that McDowell covers some issues which are politically sensitive, especially right now. The book features sexism, questionable morals, members of the LGBT+ community, characters of multiple ethnic and racial backgrounds, depictions of poverty, emotionally abusive relationships, and murder. Essentially, Coles incorporates as many of modern society’s issues as is possible in a single novel. Surprisingly, each of these issues fits naturally into the narrative and is handled in a way which leaves it up to the reader to decide how they feel about it.
Overall, McDowell by William H. Coles can be considered a modern masterpiece. It is well-written, gripping, and provocative. The characters are realistically flawed and complex, and you are likely to find at least one character to whom you can relate. I noticed a few incredibly minor proofreading errors, but they are no reason at all to miss this book. In my opinion, it’s no wonder that it was a finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition two years in a row.
You can buy a physical or eBook copy of McDowell by William H. Coles on Amazon. Also make sure to check out the McDowell website and Coles’s website and podcast.
Do you know of any books I should read? E-mail me at thewritersscrapbin@gmail.com and let me know!
Designed by Stephanie Hoogstad circa 2011