Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Last month, we launched a new column here at AICN, a look at books that are making their way through the system right now, giving you a preview of upcoming publications in the same way we give you a preview of upcoming films. Frank Bascombe, as good a sportswriter as I've ever read, took some time off from watching the NCAA finals right now and wrote up peeks at three more titles you can expect to see soon. Well, two titles, actually... but I'll let Frank explain that one to you.
IT'S NOT A SECRET IF I DON'T TELL ANYONE
By Frank Bascombe
THE RACKETS By Thomas Kelly
Everyman has his price... what's yours? - Jimmy Hoffa
Thomas Kelly opens his second novel with this pitch perfect statement from "Captain Obvious" himself. By now, most everyone has seen the movie with Jack doing his best Hoffa impersonation, playing the brawling teamster who will do what the other guys won’t. THE RACKETS is all about the teamsters and their crooked ways... almost all, that is. Jimmy Dolan, son of the “good man” teamster Mike Dolan, is the center of this fable set in the construction business of New York City at the close of the mid-'90s.
Jimmy left the “business” to pursue an educated life in the world of politics just outside his family’s reach. There are so many characters introduced to you in the first fifty pages that you almost have to read it twice. First up, there's Jimmy’s sweet Irish Rose that he left behind in the process of untangling himself from Inwood, the Irish-American enclave at the tip of Manhattan, who has become a police officer. Is she just trying to get some attention from Jimmy? Doesn't seem like it. Tara wants to be the best cop she can, and has stood up to the abuse heaped on her for choosing this side of the law. Then we bounce off to Punchy Dolan, Mike’s brother who has been robbing the stock market and certain gambling bookies to maintain his upscale lifestyle, which we only glimpse once every four chapters or so.
The opening moments of the book place us in the heart of the Mayor’s mansion at a breakfast with Jimmy, who is the mayor’s right hand man, kibitzing with some local fundraiser. The head of the teamster's union sits nearby and waits for the Mayor’s attention. One thing leads to another, and suddenly Jimmy’s shoved Frankie Keefe to the floor. Oh... by the way... anytime the Mayor of New York steps outside his private office, the press is there to take a picture. They must have more film of him than they do of the President of the United States. If you live in New York City, the DAILY NEWS has embossed a picture of the mayor on every frontal lobe in the five boroughs. Jimmy and Frankie’s wrestling match makes it to the front page, and Jimmy finds himself out of a job. That’s how fast it can all happen. A promising career and a bad temper and poof! It’s gone in a New York minute. You think that song was conjured up out of thin air?
For some reason, though, this book doesn’t happen in a New York minute. Thomas Kelly’s first novel PAYBACK, which was about virtually the same thing as THE RACKETS, revolved around the “sandhogs”, the Irish-American men who work in the tunnels under Manhattan. That novel moved along so slowly and predictably that you almost wanted to skip pages at certain points to get to the pay off. It’s about men and how they interact with each other, or don’t, in the case of PAYBACK. How many times do we need to read about the ramifications of men being men? Dad hits his son, then hugs him. The emotions bounce back and forth so fast, you don’t have time to react to them. When will fathers stop trying to get their sons to pay for their sins and start taking their shortcomings out on themselves instead? Look in the mirror; you’re the only one who can change what you don’t like looking at.
There is a great deal of the old Irish world, or “the way it was back then,” in THE RACKETS. It actually drives one character whose only form of expression is to beat someone to within an inch of their life, or to rob, or to steal. These characters want it all to be the same forever. They wish Inwood would stay the same and that the Puerto Ricans would stay in their own neighborhoods. People don’t change, things do. By page 200, I was so exhausted with the characters' constant complaints about how "the world had gone out and changed while they just stood in place" that I felt no interest in their tears, nor any need for another lecture on how things used to be. A tight web is woven around a local teamster election with a mafia boss Tommy Magic (great name, though, right?) thrown in for a little stereotypical fear factor. Mike Dolan manages to stay so clean in this world of corruption that if you walked into the bathroom he was just in, you would smell vanilla ice cream. Of course, you need the good guys to offset the one-note morons that have been cast as the leads in this story, like the barrel-chested Frankie Keefe, who would probably be played by Alec Baldwin if this book ever saw the movie screens. What would it take to keep the phrases “in for a penny, in for a pound” and “we’ll see how this one plays out” down to only one or two appearances in this novel?
Jimmy Dolan and his father Mike make it through very little, and when they finally are torn apart, it's tragically, as it often is with fathers and sons. Tara is Jimmy’s conscience, and she's written so poorly that it’s hard to imagine her as a woman. She genuflects to Jimmy, even takes a beating for him, but in no way is the reader ever attracted to her. Does she become his savior in the end, or just a crutch?
With an accurate, graphic, go-for-the-throat style going for it, THE RACKETS wants to be a Richard Price novel so, so, so badly, that you can almost feel Price’s prose on each page. Kelly writes about the horrifically flawed Manhattan in such descriptive detail that you’d think he knows every inch by heart and could give a walking tour of it with his eyes closed. If anything, you have to say that he’s got the island down cold. He knows his history, his people, and his facts. Kelly writes much better when he’s not trying to sound like one of his literary heroes and when he isn't living in the past, but that’s just where THE RACKETS is stuck.
HIGH MAINTENANCE By Jennifer Belle
At first glance, I wanted to hate this novel and hate it hard. Our heroine starts out by telling us in Bridget Jones-style about her husband and their pending divorce. Liv Kellermen, daughter of a famous fashion designer, will never have to worry about a dollar, but she decides not to clue daddy in on this little marital bump in the road and instead goes it alone, out on her own in the big, bad city. We don’t hear until the novel is nearly complete why she left her husband, and when we do learn the nature of the rareified air she enjoyed, it seems like a weak excuse for a woman of her moral strength, or lack thereof. This is Dorothy Gale going solo, folks, so grab the dog! Have we got a ride for you!
Where did the predisposed opinion come from? Jay McInerney’s quote for her first book GOING DOWN is reprinted on the back of this one. In it, he likens Jennifer Belle to Liz Phair and the multi-talented author Lorrie Moore. Jeez... don’t shackle the poor girl before she evens sits down at her desk or anything. Mr. McInerney was Raymond Carver’s student, and some people in the publishing world think his writing is still relevant, but it’s not. Thankfully, he didn’t write this book.
Mrs. Guy Ritchie snapped up the movie rights for GOING DOWN some time ago, and Jennifer Belle has been living down the expectations on her second novel for nearly as long. HIGH MAINTAINENCE will hit a super store near you soon, and I think it will surprise even the most stubborn critics in the process. Liv’s voice is so pure with surprise and shock at what’s behind the velvet rope in New York City that it feels refreshing. She finds a place in the Village that’s almost falling down and takes a job with a blind lawyer named Jerome, who seems to only want to mentally masturbate over Liv when she’s not around.
Liv leaves Jerome for another job in a hurry. She’s got to move quick because, don’t you know, each chapter heading of the book is an abbreviation for a description found in the real estate section used to describe apartments in New York City. Example: Pre War Gem, Sub-0, HRDWD FLRS, WEA/80S 3 BR RM THIS WON’T LAST! That’s right... she becomes a real estate agent in Manhattan. She takes the class, passes the test, and gets her diploma, and along the way, she meets a boy who wants to have sex with her constantly, who literally bites her neck so hard during the act that they buy a football helmet to wear during the event. Quickly she finds another bizarre man/woman character to latch on to, a cross-dressing real estate agent that teaches her the ropes. With a name as ambiguous as Dale, it's hard to tell hir gender from a distance.
Neurotic and as slick as deer guts, HIGH MAINTAINENCE is the other side of SEX & THE CITY. Liv gets hurt and you feel like you know someone just like her. You don’t want to root for this girl and her posh never-needs-a-comb-or-a-dry-cleaner life, but you do. When she comes full circle and has her epiphany, finally making perfect sense out of everything that has happened in the previous 300 pages, any reader should close the book with a smile, comfortable with the knowledge that you’ve just been given a small treat in the form of this week or so inside of a perplexingly weird and brilliantly rendered New York Life, as written by an author who knows just where to get the best deal in town.
SUBVERSION by T.A. Alderson
Sometimes there are words that bump into you, and you look back on them with respect. Titles... book titles, especially... have that power for me. SUBVERSION was one of those that did just that, that went out and got some respect. Our heroine is tough and smart and sexy and believable. She’s a tough combination to conjure up unless you’re a good writer. Alderson is, and so we’ve got a lawyer that hits the ball so far out of the park, it’s scary, and a story that would make Raymond Chandler sit up and smile. It’s a thriller with only one flaw.
It’s about the law, and a law firm.
Grisham and Turow and a whole jury of others have covered this ground before, and it’s a woefully beaten-down genre. But pick this up. Give it a try. You get tricked into it and before you know it, you’ve read this little gem, somehow setting aside your fears and suspending your disbelief and enjoying the show. There is a long lecture about the state of the world delivered by another character to our heroine that is so good you will want to write it down and recite it to every know-it-all political blow hard you’ll ever face at your company Christmas parties.
Sorry... you would want to if you read the book, but you won’t have that chance. You’re never going to read this book. For reasons not yet at my disposal, this book got pulped moments before its on-sale date. It will never see the light of day now. Who knows why it was cancelled? But it was. Some day, you may read a book by T.A. Alderson, and if you have that chance you better take it, because in the end, it’s about those who can compete, not those who can’t, and this writer is better than 99% of what’s out there.
