The Whole

In this hip supernatural tale, a blonde, surgicallcy-enhanced MTV VJ named Thing finds herself unemployed when ratings on her show fall. Thing loses herself in the New York party scene, where her mind is anesthetized by a continuous flow of pink cocktails administered by an always lurking "Black Rabbit".

Meanwhile, a small boy named Bobby Peterson in America's heartland is digging in his backyard sandbox when the hole suddenly starts funneling inward, sucking up Bobby, his parents, and most of his house, then stopping as abruptly as it began. As the media covers this phenomenon, the hole expands, sucking in reporters, policemen and anyone else standing nearby.

Thing has always felt she has a higher purpose, so when her replacement is lost in the hole as well, she takes back her old job and begins a search around the country for the truth behind the hole. Leaving a trail of new holes in her wake, Thing realizes she has a powerful connection to the phenomenon, and she may be the only one who holds the key to the meaning of the hole.

Kirkus Reviews

Media satire about a vacant piece of TV eye candy on a quixotic quest. Boy, those MTV VJs sure are stupid, aren't they? That's the precis in this location-hopping whirligig about a particularly popular and insecure member of that exclusive tribe, one who aims higher than her station and is repeatedly smacked around for it. Like Chauncey in the movie Being There, Reed's dim-bulb blonde hardly understands anything about anything but is quite aware of the importance of television. Plucked from the masses at an MTV-filmed beach party, Thing-the author's limitless contempt forbids his even giving her a name-is a quick hit on the channel, which hires her as a correspondent and promotes her physical attributes by having her pop out of a number of already-revealing outfits. So far, so good for Thing. But then ratings start to drop, she loses the job, and ends up spiraling down the media superstar ladder. Mixed into the story is some addle-brained nonsense about a gigantic hole in the country's heartland that's sucking everything and anything into it, a sort of terrestrial black hole. This phenomenon dovetails with the oddball desire for something she knows only as "the middle" that leads Thing on a magical mystery tour to Roswell, Las Vegas, and beyond, camera crew in tow. Reed (A Still Small Voice, 2000, etc.) actually seems to think he's making a vast statement about mass media-while the digs at MTV in fact seem like product placement dropped into a book they're publishing-and about the ditzy Thing. Barely a page goes by where he doesn't slap in some too-obvious jab at her lack of intelligence: "All Thing could find to do was go back to Manhattan for the opening of Shakespeare in the Park,which Thing learned, was to take place, oddly enough, in a park." It gets old. A whole lot of nothing. Agent: Kim Witherspoon/Witherspoon Associates

John Reed was the kind of man who, one instant, might touch you to your very core — send a symphony into the marrow of your bones. But he was also the type who, the next instant, might prove exasperatingly shallow. Such was his sad contradiction. There he'd be reciting something truly something — but reciting it at the exclusive room of the trendiest possible of-the-second club to an audience of those beautiful and ambitious New Yorkers who, though not always successful at it, were the most willing, in the name of glory, to lead lives unexamined and vapid.

His tragic and untimely demise unfolded at a juncture when I was most disgusted with him — for not a month earlier, his reprehensible behavior had ended our relationship. One that had seemed riddled...well, with potential.

He could be a boy sometimes, standing as he would have in 1977, a child of the Manhattan wasteland — a body filthy and lean, and trying to discover for itself honor in the void. This aspect of his work had been of interest to me. And since, during the course of our romance, we discussed our writing with each other, I became quite familiar with his proposal for Duh Whole — the tale of a girl gone awry, and a great big hole. Hence, it was not unexpectedly (the prospect of finishing the unfinished works of expired authors ever-tempting) that I was approached the very minute John first coughed (with luck, it'd be a foreshadowing of consumption and doom). His outline proved surprisingly complete, and having no book deal of my own, I was soon secured in the effort — and with John's institutionalization and rapid decline, I was given the green light. If you like mywork, you might look for other novels ostensibly by Reed, such as Snowball's Chance and A Still Small Voice, which, incidentally, I also wrote.