Book review: Road Dogs, by Elmore Leonard

Published on Friday 27 November 2009 19:26

ROAD DOGS BY ELMORE LEONARD Weidenfeld, 272pp, £18.99 Review by ROBERT PINSKY

ELMORE Leonard has been rightly praised for his hot, fast narrative, tasty dialogue, strokes of character so quick they're invisible, and writing in which there's never a detail that doesn't move things ahead.

But a good book should also be about something. Although it isn't always mentioned, Leonard's books have subjects. His latest, Road Dogs, is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Road Dogs is droll, exciting, and – underlying its material of sex, violence and money, and beyond its cast of cons and thugs and movie stars – asks interesting questions.

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 bark and perhaps knock over the occasional dustbin – 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?

The characters with which he works out the answers to these questions include three figures from his past novels. The short, passionate and ruthless Cuban crook Cundo Rey first appeared in Leonard's LaBrava. Though now in prison, Rey is a prosperous criminal, owner of attractive houses in Venice, California. In one of these lives his nefarious, supposedly faithful lover, Dawn Navarro, a gorgeous psychic and con artist who first appeared as the hypnotic Reverend Dawn in Leonard's Riding the Rap.

The third reappearing character, Jack Foley, is all but explicitly portrayed as George Clooney, who played the charming, intelligent bank robber Foley in Out of Sight, Steven Soderbergh's excellent 1998 film based on Leonard's novel of the same title. Here he is a little older but still proficient in a dirty fight.

Films matter in Leonard's fiction. 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. His characters even compose lines for themselves. 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 resemble those of a screenwriter. 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 clich.)

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."

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? Leonard's answer, entertainingly worked out as narrative, appears to be "possibly" – or maybe it's "in a manner of speaking".