This novel is based on the true story of the kidnapping of an Exxon executive in New Jersey. Scribner delves into the minds of Theo and Colleen, the fictional kidnappers, who feel they are owed more in life than they have been dealt. They plan this kidnapping so that the end result will be a huge ransom for them and consequently give them the life they feel they deserve. The victim is Stona Brown, an oil executive and cut-throat businessman. The author tells the story from 5 different points of view so that we are given 5 different moral analogies as to why that particular character feels justified in what they are doing. It is hard for me to give this book a great rating because I disliked every character so very much. Even the names became an annoyance to me. Everytime I said the name Stona, it grated on my nerves; and his wife's name is Nunny -- what is that all about. As we follow this story for 3 days, the thinking of the kidnappers becomes so irrational that it is hard to get a handle on how anyone with those thoughts could ever think they are right. While kidnapping is a horrendous crime, I couldn't really even root for the victim in this book. That is a really sad commentary on America when the reader feels an aversion to the victim as well as the transgressor.

Keith Scribner, in his debut novel "The Good Life", does an admirable job with his entry into the American anthology of fictionalized true crime. It's a risky undertaking, attempting to lift sordid truth into inspiring fiction, but Scribner has firm control over his subjects, and injects his ready made plot with keen insight and incisive social commentary.

"The Good Life" is based on a New Jersey kidnapping case from the 1990s, in which a middle aged couple, in a stunning and tremendously incompetent caper, kidapped a highly placed executive at a Fortune 500 firm. It was a cautionary tale of the times, pitting the disappointment and rage of those in American society whose dreams far outstripped their talents, against the smugness and arrogance of those the system rewards.

In Scribner's novel, Theo and Coleen Wolkoviak's lives have evolved into a catalogue of failures. They're unemployed, overdrawn, and living with his father, realizing all the time that they are aging into irrelevance at forty five. The one thing neither of them ever seems short on is fantasy. They've applied their talent for hyperbole and outright fabrication to a great variety of entreprenurial efforts, all to the end of achieving the things that are owed to them. What they "deserve."

Stona Brown is everything they aspire to be. He has arrived in his career, in his marriage, in his own self image. His arrogance knows no bounds, and the sureness of his life, wealth and principles is inviolate. Until one day when his wife spies a strange woman in a pink jogging suit skulking around the foot of the driveway at an odd hour. The ordeal that follows becomes a battle for Stona Brown's life and soul.

The book is a real page turner. Some of the characterizations and language seem stilted and unreal, but as the book unfolds it seems that this is a canny calculation on the author's part--his characters are as bankrupt and empty as the language they think in. Scribner does a great job of buttressing his social exmamination by adopting a writing style which blends right into the lives and the environments he's describing.

Whether or not a reader is familiar with the case on which "A Good Life" is based, it will leave one with a new sense of what is valuable.

This book deserves to be on everyone's "must read" list, including Oprah's. Keith Scribner begins with an ordinary middle-aged suburban couple, Theo and Colleen, who are full of baby-boomer dreams and reality failures. Then he has them perform a most extraordinary act - kidnapping a petrochemical executive in order to get what they have always rightfully deserved, an $18.5 million ransom. The story is told from five points of view. This would normally unhinge any narrative, except that this plot is so riveting, so compelling in its forward thrust, that it keeps the diverse views all hanging together in its wake. As a result, we are given insight into five different moral universes. Theo, consumed by the angry detritus of failure and the need to measure up, has gone morally bankrupt. Colleen, his wife and co-conspirator, has taken moral relativism to its fantasy extreme, while instinctively trying to cover up the vacuum with acts of caring. Malcolm, Theo's father, has a moral goodness so assured that it makes him an unwitting critic, then a meddler and, ultimately, a betrayer. Stona, the innocent victim, is given the opportunity to reflect on a life of moral compromises, as a personal manipulator, as a hardened businessman, and possibly even as an abettor to murder. Nunny, Stona's wife, is a moral puritan, loyal and true, yet inside a poseur harboring deep resentments. (Dot, Malcolm's wife and implicit sixth viewpoint, is a moral cipher but just about the only "normal" person around.) As the kidnapping collapses like a California earthquake, the reader is left with his moral firmament firmly shaken, uncertain as to how to walk the straight-and-narrow and wondering how the hell we are all going to put our priorities back together again. Highly recommended, including the set-piece in which Colleen arouses herself with GoodLife (read Amway) products while fantasizing sex with the tan, blue-eyed GoodLife motivational guru - worthy of comparison with Meg Ryan's deli scene in "When Harry Met Sally."