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Caught Stealing, by Charlie Huston (2005) |
This crime thriller
didn't leave me disappointed, though I certainly liked it a lot less
than the A- awarding EW reviewer did. Caught Stealing, by Charlie Huston, (2005)This one wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either, and I couldn't really say what would have made it better. It's supposed to be a thriller, but I never really felt much excitement, just a sort of sickness at the horrendous violence and regular scenes of torture and death. I never rooted for the main character, I didn't buy his slow turn from victim to slick criminal avenger, and the scenes that were supposed to be absurd, Tarentino-esque chases and escapes were so perfectly wacky and contrived that they didn't seem real. The story is about Hank Thompson, a regular guy in NYC who agrees to take care of his neighbor's cat for a few days when the neighbor has to head out of town on an emergency visit to his sick father. Hank's a bartender and an alcoholic, and the day after he gets the cat he's beaten so badly by a pair of Russian mobsters that his kidney ruptures and he nearly dies. When he returns from the hospital he finds a key of some sort hidden under the blanket in the cat's bed, then gets so blindly drunk that he wakes up the next day unable to remember what he did with the key. This becomes a problem when a bunch of low life gangsters turn up, led by a crooked cop who will do anything to Hank, or the cat, to find out where the key went. Hank and the cat are tortured (the cat torture scene probably caused umpteen readers to close the book and go no further), but Hank escapes and survives. Much madcap action continues, with Hank being repeatedly taken captive by two warring factions of criminals, working with one side and then the other, stalling and hiding the key, and so on. A huge stash of money eventually comes into play, Hank begins to harden and fight back, the impossibly-wonderful and doglike cat walks around in a cast, and plot twists ensue. I think the raw story of this one had potential to be a noir masterpiece, and that the writing is what kept it from working, for me at least. I just never really cared about any of the characters, whether good or bad, and didn't sense much rising action. There is a climax, and a cute resolution, and the whole story takes place in just three days, as the baseball season ends and Hank's favorite team scratches and claws for a playoff spot. Caught Stealing has a lot of nice elements, and the outline was probably brilliant; the author just isn't quite good enough to pull it off with a light touch, or gritty enough to make it sing with tension and thrills. Or perhaps it's just me that never felt involved with the book or sympathetic towards the main character or much interested in the bad guy characters. Witness the book's 4/5 star rating from 30 reviews on Amazon.com, with most of the most-helpful reviews 5-star scores. Especially when you consider that most of the lower scores are from people who voted low solely because of the constant gratuitous violence. As I scanned the reviews, I found myself gravitating most towards this one-star review (link to the reviewer's page, since Amazon doesn't support direct links to individual reviews) since even though I don't agree with his score, I think his description is spot on. His last paragraph does a very good job summing up my reaction to the plot of Caught Stealing, and in far fewer words. This book felt like a lot of imaginatively-weird, but loosely-related events that were all defensible on their own, but that didn't feel like a cohesive whole when grouped together, and that never felt like they were rising towards a climax. In part, I think the book's breakneck pace worked against it, since with a new crisis situation every chapter, there was never any time for introspection or cooling down. Readers/viewers need breaks from "action and more action" from time to time, or the impact scenes lose their impact. That definitely happened to me with this novel, since by the end I had no reaction at all to the escalating violence and drama, since that's all I'd read for the past 250 pages. A feeling of cohesiveness and action that rises to a climax, rather than just bubbling along steadily isn't mandatory in a novel, or a film, but it certainly helps elevate the good ones above the average.
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
regularly see books recommended in the reviews of EW, and on the rare
occasions that they overlap one of my areas of interest, I check to see
if the Contra Costa County Library system has them, and if so I order
them. The problem is that these books are usually brand new, and I
therefore wind up on a wait list. And by the time the book finally comes
to me, 3 or 4 months after I requested it, I seldom have any memory of
the review, or even ordering the book at all. I always at least start
reading them though, as much to fill my mind with the work of other
writers as to enjoy the books themselves.