An entertaining neonoir about the wages of greed.
A man of modest ambitions falls under the spell of a shallow and rapacious billionaire.
Frank, when we meet him in 2000, just wants to build a high-quality house in Connecticut and start a new life after a failed relationship. Dmitry, the teenage son of distant acquaintances in England, happens to be around to help, though he’s an incompetent tradesman and his main talent is roping Frank (or “Franky,” as he calls him, much to Frank’s annoyance) into schemes redolent of prostitution and insurance fraud. Cutting the cord isn’t so simple for Frank, though: Over the dozen or so years after they meet, Dmitry pulls Frank into his orbit, be it for sleazy low-grade dalliances with women and drugs or sleazy high-stakes money laundering. “What sick shit within you responds to him?” a girlfriend asks Frank, and that’s the core question of the first novel by Lutz (And the Monkey Learned Nothing, 2016, etc.), editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Tonally, the novel aspires to be an intellectual thriller, heavy on the intellectual part; though the plot pivots on an explosion in 2013 that seems to have Dmitry’s hands on it, the story mainly follows Frank’s ongoing moral hand-wringing over multiple aspects of Dmitry’s life. Lutz carefully chronicles Frank’s inner storms (references to The Third Man are just one echo of Graham Greene here), though Dmitry is less resolved. Lutz alternates between making him a mere allegory of capitalist greed or an outright cartoon of it (right down to the oversized penis). “It would be a gigantic error to settle for being a capitalist pig when I can, with not an iota’s more effort, be an imperialist pig,” Dmitry declaims. The clash of sensibilities between Frank and Dmitry gives the novel a queasy frisson, though one wishes it had more to say about the mind of the pig.
An entertaining neonoir about the wages of greed.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912248-64-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Repeater Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not quite idiomatic—for that there’s Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version—but the translation moves easily...
“ ‘I don’t need any…translations,’ muttered Raskolnikov.” Well, of course he does, hence this new translation of an old standby of Russian-lit survey courses.
Driven to desperation, a morally sketchy young man kills and kills again. He gets away with it—at least for a while, until a psychologically astute cop lays a subtle trap. Throw in a woman friend who hints from the sidelines that he might just feel better confessing, and you have—well, maybe not Hercule Poirot or Kurt Wallender, but at least pretty familiar ground for an episode of a PBS series or Criminal Minds. The bare bones of that story, of course, are those of Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, when Dostoyevsky was well on the road from young democrat to middle-aged reactionary: thus the importance of confession, nursed along by the naughty lady of the night with the heart of gold, and thus Dostoyevsky’s digs at liberal-inclined intellectuals (“That’s what they’re like these writers, literary men, students, loudmouths…Damn them!”) and at those who would point to crimes great and small and say that society made them do it. So Rodion Raskolnikov, who does a nasty pawnbroker, “a small, dried-up miserable old woman, about sixty years old, with piercing, malicious little eyes, a small sharp nose, and her bare head,” in with an ax, then takes it to her sister for good measure. It’s to translator Katz’s credit that he gives the murder a satisfyingly grotty edge, with blood spurting and eyes popping and the like. Much of the book reads smoothly, though too often with that veneer of translator-ese that seems to overlie Russian texts more than any other; Katz's version sometimes seems to slip into Constance Garnett–like fustiness, as when, for instance, Raskolnikov calls Svidrigaylov "a crude villain...voluptuous debaucher and scoundrel.”
It’s not quite idiomatic—for that there’s Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version—but the translation moves easily and legibly enough through Raskolnikov’s nasty deeds, game of cat and mouse, and visionary redemption.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-033-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.
The heart-expanding extremes of life—first love and last rites—are experienced by an unsettled young Dubliner spending one exceptional spring in a small Irish village.
Christy McMahon “walked this line between the comic and the poignant,” and so does Williams (History of the Rain, 2014, etc.) in his latest novel, another long, affectionate, meandering story, this one devoted to the small rural community of Faha, which is about to change forever with the coming of electricity to the parish. Delighting in the eccentricities of speech, behavior, and attitude of the local characters, Williams spins a tale of life lessons and loves new and old, as observed from the perspective of Noel Crowe, 17 when the book’s events take place, some six decades older as he narrates them. Noel’s home is in Dublin, where he was training to become a Catholic priest, but he's lost his faith and retreated to the home of his grandparents Doady and Ganga in Faha. Easter is coming, and the weather—normally infinite varieties of rain—turns sunny as electrical workers cover the countryside, erecting poles and connecting wires. Christy, a member of the electrical workforce, comes to lodge alongside Noel in Doady and Ganga's garret but has another motive: He’s here to find and seek forgiveness from the woman he abandoned at the altar 50 years earlier. While tracing this quest, Williams sets Noel on his own love trajectory as he falls first for one, then all of the daughters of the local doctor. These interactions are framed against a portrait of village life—the church, the Gaelic football, the music, the alcohol—and its personalities. Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity.
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-420-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
