About book Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime #21) (2006)
I almost clicked one star for this one. I did it! I clicked one star! Maybe I should go back and give the Max Allan Collins books one star, too, but they at least succeed in being an entertaining enough piece of genre fiction. This book doesn't succeed there at all. And it wasn't because I think I remember reading once that Bell thought DFW was floundering for not producing at the rate that Vollmann was. But I could be wrong about this.This book is remarkably bad. Not bad in the way remarkably bad manner of say Max Allan Collins' hardcase novels (of the few I've read) are bad, but bad in the, why was this book even written, bad category. I will grant that I'm getting tired of the crime-genre. I've read too much of it in the past few months. I want out. I don't understand how people can exclusively read one or two types of genre fictions, doesn't it get old being stuck in the same basic structures? Yeah, there are some brilliant writers contained in those structures, but there is also so much mediocre-ness. So much that is formulaic, and too often when a writer tries to break from the tried and true formulas you realize why those formulas are there in the first place, innovation just doesn't work sometimes in this element. (Yeah, literary fiction can be formulaic, too, but I think (in my opinion, mine) there is more room for writers to move about in the literary world, yeah there are a bazillion and counting Corrections knock-offs, but you can see them from a mile away and if you don't want to read yet another dysfunctional modern family novel you can easily avoid it, you can judge a book by the cover).While walking through the Times Square Subway station, transferring from the N train to the 7, walking up the steps that lead up from the platform that leads down to the N train, up to the platform that would be a couple of dozen steps to the long staircase leading down into the bowels of the station where the 7 train waits(I'll return to this in a moment, keep this somewhere in the back of your mind, because there is a reason I gave those details), I thought maybe I'm being unfair to the book, maybe I'm thinking of it as a 'crime' novel or a thriller (as Walker Percy raves about it being on the front cover) when really I should be reading it just as a novel, a literary novel? written by a literary novelist? Maybe I need to enframe the text and remove it from the context of being a hardcase novel and see it for what it is in a Heideggerian thing-in-itself essence or some shit like that. I thought this for a moment and then I thought, no, it still pretty much fails. And then I thought, yes it's boring, yes it's bogged down in details and minutiae, but then again so are the novels of John le Carré, but his slow pacing builds layers to the story, it's slow but the layers are all building to the edifice of the story. Not here.About three quarters of the novel could have been cut and it wouldn't have hindered my understanding of what was going on, or taken away anything from the plot. There is so much wasted details given, we get detailed directions of where the narrator walks to in New York City, which is great I guess, it shows that you are familiar with the Union Square / Chelsea / Williamsburg Bridge (I think maybe it's the Brooklyn Bridge) / Brooklyn Navy Yard areas of the city, but it doesn't add anything to the story. It was as necessary as the description I gave above of my walk from the N train to the 7 train. I could have just as easily said, I was thinking as I walked from the N train to the 7 train and it would have been just as fine. Directions. What the narrator ate. And again what he ate. The time he wakes up. The long first chapter where he shots his dog because the dog is getting on in the years (I kept thinking, that was a pointless chapter, and I kept thinking that there is a reason he included it, and it will come back in some significant way later on in the book, but nope, he does return to the dead dog theme but it's only as a neat little bookend to wrap up the book, totally unnecessary (in my humble opinion, but what do I know I'm just some doofus who works in a big box bookstore and writes reviews on the internets). The narrators a part-time drunk, we know this because we are given too many pointless scenes of him drinking too much in bars. He seems more like some dude who likes to tie one on now and then, but through repetition of seeing him drinking yet again and because we are told he's one the reader can be safely ok with thinking that the narrator is his old friend the drunken protagonist of hard-boiled novels. Instead of giving (probably, I didn't count, but I'm making an educated guess) about forty pages or so to the narrators drinking, mostly in scenes that do nothing for the plot, Bell could have just said something like, 'I took my place on the stool at the bar, even though it was a new bar the familiarity of the place made me feel at home, and when the first shot of bourbon hit my stomach I felt like I was home again", yeah that sucks, but you get the idea. He's comfortable in bars drinking copious amounts of booze. Even though Bell gives an excessive amount of tedious details about the day to day life of the narrator, I didn't feel like I really knew anything about the character. He never comes alive. None of the supporting characters do either. Everyone feels like a stock character lifted from the hardboiled handbook.But what about the actual 'crime' element? Well, once the novel finally gets around to this somewhere just a few pages past the halfway point, the novel doesn't get any stronger. It quickly became apparent that the whole first half of the book wasn't adding too much to the story, it was background material and a chance to put lots of details in place in lieu of having to tell a story. If I didn't think too much I might think that what was happening in the first half was a slow progression, but that wasn't the case, it was mostly just filer, pretty much none of the 'background' and 'build-up' added anything to the novel. The crime element itself was farcical, unintentionally. It made no sense, it made no sense why people acted like they did, why in the age of Swiss Bank Accounts and Off-Shore Accounts and other ways of moving money around that half of the stuff needed to happen that was happening. This could have been given an explanation, and I would have been happy with one, but instead none was offered. I feel like Bell expected me to think the crime element was well thought out and because he had bombarded me with unnecessary details earlier in the novel (and continued to throughout the novel). At one point I was suspecting that Bell was guilty of just withholding information from the reader that could have been given earlier and then he would spring it on me to make the story come together and make it seem like a mystery had been solved when there hadn't really ever been one except why I was being kept in the dark. But that wasn't the case. There was nothing offered. There is actually so much in this book I could point out as being bad. Like, when he has the narrator sniff some heroin and then he goes through withdrawl for three days. Really? One sniff of heroin and you're going to be junk sick? Did you learn your drug facts from one of those War on Drug ads or an After School Special? It makes me wonder what other 'details' about film editing, currency exchange and other things in the book are fabricated bullshit (not that I'm an expert on heroin, but I've known people who have dabbled in it and one friend who killed himself with it to have at least a bit of knowledge about what sniffing heroin does and does not do to you).While the writing itself is fine, what the well strung together words mean and the story they are working towards telling is pretty much a waste. Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. Maybe this is the result of what happens when a 'literary' writer thinks he just can slum it and churn out a piece of genre fiction.
Straight Cut is narrated by Terry, a freelance film editor with a fondness for Kierkegaard. Intellectualism is not uncommon in noir fiction, and when it is done well, it can enhance a narrative with an added vein of dark poetry. In the case of Straight Cut, however, the narrator's philosophizing serves only to make a tedious narrative even more tedious. Terry, who is at least not UN-likeable, is invovled in a love triangle (and other things) with his self-absorbed ex-wife Lauren and his creepy sometimes-best friend Kevin. As the narrative progresses--and it progresses SLOWLY--it is difficult to fathom why Terry would ever have wanted anything to do with either one of them. Most interesting part of the book: the extended descriptions of the techincal aspects of film cutting and editing.
Do You like book Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime #21) (2006)?
The first 100 pages of this book read like a how-to on film editing. Which would be great if I had any interest at all in the field. Once the story kicked in I found it a little dull.One thing that could be said for the author; he knows his way around New York City as well as the many locations throughout Europe were the character travels.Other than that, this book didn't seem like a great fit in the Hard Case Crime series and to me, the tag line on the cover of the book seemed a little misleading. In the end, this was a pretty thin, boring story that was barely worth the dollar I paid for it. Slow and uneventful.
—Derek Schneider
