Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Road Dogs — “a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal”

Elmore Leonard’s latest novel stars three familiar voices in a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal

by Robert Pinsky
Illustration by Joe Ciardello

The virtuoso storyteller Elmore Leonard has been rightly praised for his technique: hot, fast narrative, tasty dialogue, strokes of character so quick they’re invisible, never a detail that doesn’t move things ahead. It’s wonderful how much Leonard can do with a five- syllable sentence like “She left with the check.”

But a good book should also be about something. Although it isn’t always mentioned, Leonard’s books have subjects. “Road Dogs” is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in human relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Droll and exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance of a master now in his mid-80s, “Road Dogs” — underlying its material of sex, violence and money, and beyond its cast of cons and thugs and movie stars — presents interesting questions.

The New York Times Book Review

Elmore Leonard’s latest novel stars three familiar voices in a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal

by Robert Pinsky
Illustration by Joe Ciardello

Can a grown person change? Specifically, can a man abandon an expertise that wins him respect but makes a mess of his life? Can anybody trust anybody? Is love ever true? Is friendship ever real? Or, leaving aside love and friendship, does loyalty exist? And leaving aside loyalty, is respect possible between a man and a woman? We road dogs — trotting along companionably on our way to sniff and woof and boogie-woogie and perhaps knock over the occasional trash barrel together — are we reliable? In time of need or trouble, can any of us count on any of our pals and sweethearts not to turn on us, or turn away from us, sooner or later?

The vivid, amusing characters who embody these matters include three figures from previous Leonard novels. One of these, the rich, short, passionate and ruthless crook Cundo Rey, was among the criminals exported to the United States by Fidel Castro. Here, Cundo is imported by Elmore Leonard from his earlier novel “LaBrava.” Though now in prison, the Cuban is a prosperous criminal, owner of attractive houses in Venice, Calif. In one of those Venice houses lives Cundo’s nefarious, supposedly faithful lover, Dawn Navarro, a gorgeous psychic and con artist who first appeared, younger and less upscale, as the hypnotic Reverend Dawn in Leonard’s “Riding the Rap.”

To say that Dawn “appeared” sounds like movie language, and these characters do resemble actors, cast by Elmore Leonard to “play themselves,” as the saying goes, in his new work of fiction. As in previous Leonard novels, the characters are interested in the movies, discuss movies intelligently. To call the narrative itself cinematic is a cliché. It’s partly true, but this writer doesn’t foolishly compete with cinema where cinema has the edge: his scenes of sex and violence are clever and brief, rapidly established to let the verbal engine of dialogue drive the story forward.

The third reappearing character, Jack Foley, is all but explicitly portrayed as George Clooney, who played the charming, intelligent and self-defeating bank robber Foley in “Out of Sight,” Steven Soderbergh’s excellent 1998 movie based on Leonard’s novel of the same title. This Jack Foley is the Clooney of that film, a little older but still proficient in a dirty fight.

The movie business gives Leonard many opportunities to laugh with and at the reader from the page — like an actor looking at the camera. In his fictional world, lawyers and criminals and law officers gain respect from one another by quoting dialogue from “Three Days of the Condor” or getting references to Terrence Malick. The author makes this convincing, with deadpan aplomb.

Leonard’s characters even compose lines for themselves. (What follows may deserve a “spoiler warning,” but, on the other hand, Leonard’s plots twist so much. . . .) Planning to kill a man she has had very good times with in bed, Dawn Navarro has a story conference with herself about dialogue:

“She’d fire without cocking it. Unless she might have a few things to say first. Then cock the gun for effect, just before she says, ‘So long, Jack, it’s been . . .

“ ‘Fun?’

“ ‘A ball?’

“ ‘It’s been nice knowing you.’

“She said, ‘It’s been nice knowing you?’

“She said, ‘It was nice taking showers with you.’

“She was making it hard, trying to think instead of just saying it. How about, ‘I love you, Jack, but you’re no six-million-dollar man.’ That wasn’t bad. He’d get it.”

Here the proposed murder victim is conceived by his would-be killer as an audience, and the possibilities of language get more attention than the weapon.

In a similar way, Jack’s thoughts when he’s about to have sex with a recently widowed movie star, or not, resemble those of a screenwriter. At poolside, after a dip, about to change clothes, she has said, “I’ve been thinking. I might be rushing my return to the world”:

“He turned to look at her and said, ‘I know,’ nodding, showing he was wise as well as patient. He thought he might as well continue once he started, get it all out, and said, ‘I understand.’ He said there was no reason to hurry, it would work out or it wouldn’t. They liked each other and they’d get to it one day. The way he said it was, ‘We’ll express our love one day,’ and thought he should have said ‘show our love,’ but didn’t like that either. He should’ve said, they’d get to it, with a grin, and let it go at that.”

This Clooney-looking bank robber has the soul of a writer. Possibly, he’s more interested in sounding precisely as cool as possible than he is in ordinary seduction. Possibly, character and author both are conceding vulnerability. (Even when Leonard stoops to trite plot devices, like the unloaded gun, he has a disarming way of seeming to smirk at the reader above the cliché.)

Having characters think about fine details of speech before engaging in sex or violence isn’t merely a prank or indulgence. In a story about trust and betrayal, the hyper-intense attention to nuances of dialogue not only fits: it’s a matter of survival. The weird alertness of characters and narrators also includes a director’s eye for facial expressions. A Leonard character thinks like this: “But she didn’t work her eyes on him as he thanked her.” Another sentence about communication without words, always involving some element of trust or its opposite: “He looked at Foley, who gave his buddy a tired smile.” When Dawn ends a speech with the words “I trust you, Jack,” his response is “You make it sound easy.”

“Road Dogs,” in its moral as in its physical setting, occupies the same territory as the very old joke about “How do you say (insert two-syllable insult) in Los Angeles?” (For the few who don’t know the answer: “Trust me.”)

Leonard keeps his fight scenes quick and understated, and they too involve cons and trickery. They also involve games: some one-on-one basketball that turns violent in an unexpected way; a kind of one-on-one dodgeball with one player’s heels at the edge of a flat roof, high enough for a mistake to be fatal. Both scenes recall the reason certain kinds of deception are called confidence games.

At the novel’s beginning, Cundo and Foley are best friends in prison, with Cundo scheduled for release soon and Foley not. Cundo pays $30,000 for a super-good lady lawyer to spring his friend, who gets out first. Will Cundo expect something from Foley, probably something criminal, in return? Or can Foley trust the gesture of friendship? Will Dawn be faithful? Will Foley sleep with the widowed movie star? And so forth, with many a twist and some terrific minor characters. Do love, friendship and loyalty exist? Elmore Leonard’s answer, entertainingly worked out as narrative, appears to be “possibly so” — or maybe it’s “in a manner of speaking.”

Robert Pinsky’s latest book, “Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud,” has just been published.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Road Dogs — “a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal”

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The Official Elmore Leonard Website

Archives

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Film and TV

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Road Dogs — “a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal”

Recent Posts

The Gregg Sutter Blog

On Twitter

The Official
Elmore Leonard Website