LOW LIFE READING
My reading this year, as most, was driven by the novel I was writing. The novel itself reflected long term obsessions, but it also sparked some new ones, or brought dormant ones to life again. First there was true crime. I have not read true crime books in decades I don’t think, though they have always tempted me. A hint of things to come was Joey The Hitman, the purported memoir of a mafia hit man. But the impetus was really the chance reading of John Ronson’s The Psychopath Test and the crisis it provoked in my writing. I was writing a novel about 3 sociopaths, or so I had thought of them. Certainly the people I modeled them on were genuine sociopaths. But my characters wanted, and needed to be better than that. And Ronson’s book explored the complexities, the absurdities, the very genuinely frightening aspects of psychopathology. And I had to decide, can a protagonist of a novel be a genuine psychopath and still sympathetic enough to engage the audience? And what distortions and tricks are involved in pulling this off? Is Macbeth a psychopath? Is Dexter anything but a demented fantasy, a typical Hollywood piece of bullshit? Macbeth is true depth psychology. Dexter is shallow. But fans of Dexter are riveted by the psychology of the character. What is the role of psychology, of psychological theory, in literature?
Fortunately these questions did not lead me to Freud but to the former FBI profiler John Douglas. I can say that after reading two of his books and starting a third that you need not go beyond Mind Hunter, his memoir. But Mind Hunter is terrific reading. He’s kind of a jerk but hey, he’s an FBI agent, and his insight into psychopaths is profound. It is based totally on behavior. The problem for the novelist is that he describes mostly sadistic, psycho-sexual murderers, who are by definition irredeemable. After reading his book, and Ronson’s, it is impossible to believe that a hit man, an assassin of any kind, could be anything but a sociopath. The honorable assassin is simply a myth, a literary contrivance. But! Oh, but. Reality seems at times to contradict this.
Then came Wiseguy, Nicholas Pilleggi’s brilliant book about the late Henry Hill. So good is Scorsese’s Goodfella’s that it was impossible not to see the film as I read the book. Is Henry Hill a psychopath? I think he would score high on the test, though he appears in the book to be essentially nonviolent. But he does tell the story and could easily leave out for all kinds of reasons any murders he actually committed. One part of being a psychopath is sowing disaster wherever you go. Another is charm. Henry Hill was charming, but his life, as he describes it, is one of constant mayhem and exploitation. But he’s a colourful, enjoyable reprobate in his own narration. Charming. And an excellent protagonist.
Satan’s Circus, by Mike Dash, tells the story of Charles Becker, a New York cop executed for a murder he likely didn’t commit. Satan’s Circus is the neighborhood he worked from the 1890’s until his arrest in 1912. The book is a delicious slice of Manhattan low life and a great companion to Luc Sante’s magisterial Low Life. Satan’s Circus brought me around to another obsession, the history of New York City, and that fed into research for volume two of Drift, which concerns the very rich, in this case the very rich who have cloned themselves and become an aristocracy.
The Iceman, by Philip Carlo was a piece of entertaining trash about freelance Mafia hitman, Richard Kuklinski, who supposedly killed over 200 people, for all kinds of reasons. In the early days he killed for practice. Road rage is a frequent theme. Assholes pull up alongside his car, hurl insults, refuse to apologize and, well, he just has to blow their brains out and drive away, never to be caught. He appeared in HBO documentaries.  Online scrounging reveal he was a liar. By my count, in the book, he killed far more than 200 people. Well, even the ones who accuse him of being liar (he claims to have been part of the team that killed Jimmy Hoffa!) say he was a monster. But did he really feed living people to rats? Who cares! He’s a psychopath. He lies.
Old New York is endlessly fascinating to me but a book about the murder of a prostitute in 1836 bored me to tears because it was written by an academic. So I won’t even mention the title. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was hands down one of the greatest novels I have ever read. Again it evoked the excellent screen adaptation by Martin Scorsese. Wharton captures the 1870’s so well I forgot that it was written in the 20th century, except when she refers to inventions like the telephone, and her rather direct description of the sexual mores of her aristocratic koi. Then there was Wendy Burden’s memoir of growing up without parents, Dead End Gene Pool, another guilty pleasure. She catches up with Wharton’s people in the 20th century. Burden is from a branch of the Vanderbilt family. Her memoir shows old New York in its final collapse. It was mainly salacious, which was just fine with me. Drugs, booze and anal sex, with a little suicide and cruel depictions of senility. There is nothing like watching the uber rich drool. I then came across a wonderful 1910 novel by Bouck White, The Book of Daniel Drew, the purported autobiography of the stock market scoundrel and steamship owner Daniel Drew, a rival of Vanderbilt’s. Bouck White was a socialist and a Christian. The book is written in the voice of the illiterate Drew, but rises, almost imperceptibly, into the high literary style of the 19th century as needed. The joy of the book is its invocation of New York City in the 1790’s-1830’s, when Drew was a cattle drover and brought his herds from upstate New York into Manhattan, grazing them in what would become midtown Manhattan, and ripping off Jacob Astor’s brother, a butcher.
I’m ending the year with Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm, his prequel Nixonland and every bit as good.
Â
