Sticks and stones will break my bones but names can never hurt me, the childhood rhyme goes. But over the past decade feminists and other left-wing theorists have made naming a central concern, arguing that the one who names is the one who holds the power. Words can have real consequences in the real world, as Randy Craig, the protagonist of Janice MacDonald’s latest mystery novel, discovers.
Sticks and Stones opens with a harassing letter campaign aimed at a number of female students, threatening them with violence, even death, if they do not attend an upcoming party at a frat house. When the students start being murdered in ways suggested in the letters, Craig, who teaches English at the university, is on the trail of the killers. A campus whodunit, Sticks and Stones also functions as an office romance and a meditation on the role of language and literature within our culture. As the potboiler plot races towards its conclusion, the list of possible murder suspects multiplies, while horrendous acts of misogyny, vandalism, and physical violence repeat and intensify.
Unfortunately, Craig tends to be a smug, self-satisfied narrator who name-drops with the ease of a practiced sycophant, while the other characters too easily represent points of view within the novel’s internal feminist argument. The sweet-hearted cop Craig romances, for instance, is an obvious foil for the hard core misogynists apparently living in the undergraduate residence. Only near the novel’s end, when the good guys lose a little of their shine and the bad guys don’t seem so bad after all, does the story attain a level of moral complexity.