I am really not happy with the trade paperback I found at a local thrift store. It has Brad Pitt looking way to contemporary on a boring cover and now that I have finished the book, a totally sucky alternate title. Was this done just for the movie, because it reeks of Hollywood idiocy. The contents, fortunately, are pretty fucking tight. Higgins writes mostly in dialogue. Things happen, but you usually learn about them from one guy telling another guy in roundabout, Southie, semi-organized criminal argot. The basic plot here is that three ex-cons rip off an illegal card game in some suburban hotel and Cogan is sent in to punish them. When I was about a third of the way through, I told my wife that it didn't have much of a plot, that the real meat of the book is in the milieu and the characters and the dialogue. Those things are incredibly strong, but the plot itself actually becomes subtly kind of intricate. You realize that in this little world, everybody is sort of connected one way or another and a guy who was listening to another guy talk about two guys planning a hit on a fourth guy was actually one of the guys in on the original job that incited the need for the hit.
Cogan himself is only in about half the novel. Everyone is treated equally by the narrator and we get slices of all their various lives. Their common theme is their struggle to make money and keep their wives happy and stay out of jail and not get killed, which for most of them seems to be too much of a struggle. There were some passages that felt a bit long and I had to take a break as a guy goes on for two pages about his wife not liking it when he goes to prison. On the flip side, there were amazing little crime vignettes. One that stood out was two dog thieves, taking a carload of doped up dogs to sell in Florida who get caught in a southern deluge just as the dogs start waking up, shitting and farting in the car whose windows they can't open. And by the end, the storyline really picks up pace and it becomes hard to put it down. The ending is brutal and hard, quite sad but very satisfying. Great stuff.
here is the lame one I found
Compare that to these below:
Posts
2 comments:
The film isn't worth bothering with. It spells out clunkingly what the novel leaves unsaid.
This is what I had heard, and does not surprise me, but thank you for the further confirmation. I can imagine producers loving it and Brad Pitt seeing a great acting opportunity, but also watching them whittle away all the depth and soul to try and make it fit some imagined lowest common denominator audience.
Post a Comment