The 1965 novel Stoner by John Williams is one of those wonderful works of fiction where nothing much happens, or at least nothing much that would make for good flap copy. The hero is a literature professor who’s very lonely and reads a lot of books. That’s about it. And I loved it.
But—we might ask, in the spirit of trying to improve everything, even masterpieces that don’t need improving—what if there were just a little more plot? What if we made Stoner the architect of a small-scale heist, or the proprietor of a modestly successful meth lab?
Wouldn’t that make the book even better?
Well, no, probably not.
The stakes would feel off. When the criminal element shows up, it’s hard to focus on anything else. If you were at a poetry reading and someone yelled, “This is a robbery!” then it would become, from that point onward, very difficult to concentrate on the poet. You would first want to know about this robbery business.
Criminals and professors don’t think the same way. So we can’t write about them the same way. The standard models won’t work. We have to build new models.
It’s very hard to do.
But here are six books that have done it. They are great works of literary fiction that take, as their subjects, characters who’ve chosen a life of crime.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
We never see Jay Gatsby commit a single felony in this novel (unless you count scheming on the phone or making love to Tom Buchanan’s wife), but those who go to Gatsby’s parties are drawn to his garish mansion, at least in part, because they think he must have done something shady—killed a man or spied for the Germans, perhaps—to move on up in the world. I may have been drawn to the novel for the same reasons, “simultaneously enchanted and repelled” by the seductive depictions of wealth and excess, but it’s the book’s many insights that bring me back again and again. Of the eight most important characters in this book, five hail from the upper class, and three come from the lower class. These latter three all end up dead.
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
There’s a killer on the loose, and they call him The Misfit. Eventually he and his lackies will do something so horrible that it has to take place mostly off-screen. We hear it but don’t actually see it. If O’Connor’s short story were solely focused on The Misfit, then all we’d have is a (probably gratuitous) depiction of a psychopath. But the story isn’t really about The Misfit. It’s about the family he encounters in Florida. Not a sympathetic family. In fact, they’re pretty much the worst family ever. The story is a comedy. It’s about faith and what’s coming for us all, especially when we’re asking for it.
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
At the heart of this novel is a bombing. The bombing is an act of domestic terrorism or political protest, depending on your perspective. And this novel offers a masterclass in perspective. The bomb destroys a post office in a small idyllic town, but what Roth—and his narrator, Zuckerman—are most interested in is what’s been packed around the detonator, all the shrapnel of American life. Specifically upper-class Jewish life in New Jersey, although that’s a description of the book that doesn’t get nearly specific enough. The life of Swede Levov—former athlete, blond Jew, married to a former Miss New Jersey named Dawn—becomes a full life, a real life, and by the end of the book we know him to the bones, and we understand why the criminal acts that have torn apart his family represent the kind of detonations that ripped apart the country in the middle of the last century.
Lush Life, Richard Price
Most writers on this list write literary fiction that might—at least this once—qualify as crime fiction. But Richard Price writes crime fiction that pretty much always qualifies as literary. It’s not easy to understand what’s going on in a Price novel—characters speak to one another in shorthand, as if you’re not there, as if they’ve never even heard of a reader—but, slowly, you acclimate. Learning the language makes you an insider. If you’re a fan of The Wire (a show Price wrote for), then you know the experience, and you’ll be a fan of Price’s work (if you’re not already). In Lush Life, Price tracks the fallout from a shooting in the Lower East Side in 2003. Time and place are important. Price is examining the threshold between old New York and new New York, a city that’s in the process of gentrifying but not all the way there yet. Characters live parallel lives, separated by class, race, and occupation—until a homicide flings them all together.
Netherland, Joseph O’Neill
Like Lush Life, Netherland is a novel about New York that came out in 2008 and takes place in the aftermath of 9/11, but there’s no new language to learn, perhaps because there are so many echoes of Fitzgerald in the perfect lyrical prose. Price is a born-and-raised New Yorker, whereas Joseph O’Neill is an Irishman raised in Holland. The narrator of Netherland is a cricket-playing Dutch guy named Hans who works in finance. Hans becomes infatuated with a Gatsby-like character named Chuck Ramkissoon, a hustler from Trinidad. Like the lower-class characters in Gatsby who dare to make something of themselves, Ramkissoon ends up dead in the Gowanus Canal (but this is no spoiler; Hans reads about Chuck’s death in the Times on page three of the novel). What killed Chuck is a mystery that’s never actually solved. Or maybe it is. Maybe what killed him is the American grind. The principal characters of Netherland are all immigrants, and some of them will do anything to live the American dream, even if it means breaking an American law or two.
The Privileges, Jonathan Dee
Not all criminals wield a gun, and not all books about crime begin with a dead body. The Privileges follows a family that cheats its way to the top, but the book’s genius may be that the family doesn’t start cheating right away. We get to know the two protagonists when they’re just a young couple, Adam and Cynthia, on their wedding day in Pittsburgh. This opening chapter is a tour de force, to literature what The Godfather’s wedding scene is to cinema. Adam breaks bad around the middle of the novel, hatching an insider trading scheme. There’s not all that much mystery here. We basically know what he’s doing and why. This is how white collar criminals become white collar criminals. This is what their choices do to their relationships. And to their children. The children don’t inherit the family business, but they inherit the wealth and privilege generated by the business and all the baggage, too. How they come out will determine if this dark journey has been at all worthwhile.
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