Hallelujah!
Elsewhere in these pages (Non-P Lit Crit) we some time ago appreciated the fiction of Donald E. Westlake. His latest, a nifty little caper-novel called Put a Lid on It, only confirms our opinion that good writing will out. Much (most?) American fiction (and poetry, alas) these days comes (so to speak) from the world’s longest running circle jerk of the little magazines, a handful of "prestigious" graduate writing programs, and about ten million seekers after prosal immortality—the whole affair overseen by the stern demigod-taskmasters at The New Yorker and their hand(so to speak)maidens at The New York Times Book Review. Though all navels look pretty much alike (you’ve got innies, you’ve got outties, and that’s it), there’s no doubt something to be said for navel-gazing (simply because there’s something to be said for just about human activity you can name). Whether navel-gazing of the sort prized by the present-day American literati leads to great—or even good—fiction is another matter entirely. The work of Donald E. Westlake is a prime case in point to demonstrate that non-navel-gazing most definitely can produce good fiction. You don’t have to be an omphaloskeptic. You don’t have to be part of the circle jerk. All that’s necessary is all that’s ever been necessary for the writer: be a close observer of the world and what happens in it, be a gifted teller of tales (which basically means: interesting characters, a good beginning, a good middle, and a good ending), and have a way with words words words. As Westlake has shown time and again, from the workman-like novels of his apprentice years (it would not be beneath the circle-jerkers to refer to those works as "pulp"), through a whole range of both funny and serious books and screenplays, he’s got all the equipment. In Put a Lid on It, that equipment is still in excellent working order. A master of both the caper and the con, Westlake here has at the world of bigtime (as in "presidential election") politics. Somebody’s got an incriminating video of the current president and the bright guys running his campaign decide the only safe way to get their hands on it is to hire a skillful burglar. Which leads them to Francis Xavier Meehan, skillful—if non-violent—burglar who’s just made one small mistake and is on his way to do big time in the federal big house. Francis, no dummy he (see sidebar), right from the beginning sees the con the election guys are trying to run on him, but figures he can stay one step ahead of them when they offer him a pardon if he’ll help them out. Francis accepts the offer, and helps them out, though not quite in the way the political stooges had in mind. All ends well, at least for Francis, and for the reader as well, who puts down the book realizing he’s just watched a master at work. Not a wasted word. Not a wrong note struck, and with a cornucopia of throw-away bon mots scattered throughout (Francis describes the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan where he's briefly incarcerated the beginning of the story as a "chrome cesspit"; later he's listening to one of the gluttonous windbags on talk radio whom he summarizes as "one of the best minds of the thirteenth century"). Westlake is a kind of Shakespeare without princes or poetry. Beneath the surface cynicism and wisecracks beats a writerly heart still after all these years mesmerized by the old comédie humaine, still fascinated by, and finally forgiving of, the dizzying, blundering missteps that keep on making the world go round. END
Want more info?
|
Survival Tips Westlake's latest struggling survivor, Francis Xavier Meehan, middle-aged burglar malgré lui (see review), has accumulated over the years what he calls "The Ten Thousand Rules," tips on getting from one day to the next in this confusing world. Meehan carries the Ten Thousand Rules about in his head (one of the rules is: "Never write it down"). In the course of the novel, Francis shares a few of his rules for survival with us:
|
In an age of mediocrity,
finding a well-crafted, well-written, well-edited novel is truly like stumbling across an
oasis in the Sahara. It happens, but not very often, which of course makes the finding of
it all the better.
Don’t count your chickens.