Review of Anthony McCarten’s Show of Hands

It’s a common theme, forcing people into situations where there is no easy way out. With this kind of setting the author can create and develop characters easily since there isn’t much else to do. The more isolated the group is, the more easily these backgrounds come about. It’s this trope that keeps Show of Hands moving at a comfortable pace.

With anywhere from three to six major characters Show follows the competitors of Back-to- Back New Cars’ contest to win a new car. The characters’ tasks are to keep their hands on a vehicle the longest. With fifteen minute breaks every two hours the contest is expected to go on for days. Indeed, Terry “Hatch” Back, the car lot’s owner, wants to go for a world record, which is established to be a little over five days. Since there are numerous real life examples of these kinds of contests to build from, the reader can move past this issue quickly and head into the actual story.

The narration is first person and largely shifts between two contestants, Tom Shrift and Jess Podorowski, and Hatch. Tom is a down on his luck Mensa member who has decided this honor does, indeed, make him better than the rest of the world’s population. Jess is a kind at heart Meter Maid who seems to have stresses coming from every facet of her life as people insult her at work while at the same time her home life contains an overbearing Polish mother and a severely handicapped daughter. Finally, Hatch rounds out the perspectives through narration that explains the desperate need for publicity to ensure the dealership doesn’t go under, along with an equally necessitated attempt to figure out who he is and what he really wants to be happy.

Along with the handful of other characters, these three set up a supremely strong beginning to a promising story. However, that’s about as far as it goes. With a largely predictable plot, characters who never really take a chance to look at themselves objectively, revelations the reader isn’t privy to, and poorly developed consequences to decisions that very much drive the story to its inevitable conclusion, Show of Hands plays at cliché when it could have been refreshing and unique.

McCarten, Anthony. Show of Hands. New York: Washington Square Press, 2009.