A Simple Plan
This book has disaster written all over it. From the way that the characters keep slowly talking themselves into things and revising their thought processes, you can always feel the slow drift away from their originally good intentions. A Simple Plan remind us that rarely are things so simple.
In Scott Smith’s novel, a group of men find a bag of abandoned money. They argue over what to do with it, trying to determine what’s right. The beauty of this book is how many ways it finds to present the concept of what is “right”. Without giving away details, I’ll give an example from an ethics class I took that also illustrates this point. One classmate said it was wrong to pollute because it could hurt people. Another argued that it was a company’s duty to pollute so that legislation could be enacted that would protect the people from any company polluting. So which is truly “right”? One company protecting the people near it, or a company which forces a government to protect all its people?
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to ask these questions. However, this world is full of humans and therefore can’t be perfect. As the story progresses it is fraught with tension. Each person is afraid of getting caught or getting turned in. Each person has their own sense of how to handle the situation correctly. Each person has a different opinion of what is morally right.
Each person does not make it out alive.
Smith’s book is an in-depth look at how horribly people can behave whether or not they think what they are doing is right. It’s an engaging read and one that I recommend wholly.
- Kristin Diverxtrme
