Review: Dodgers

Dodgers by Bill Beverly
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a pretty good crime novel. It’s got a great perspective since our point-of-view is East, a “watcher” at an L.A. crack house. He takes in everything he sees, always alert to threats and always committed to the “safe” way. There’s a lot of money in the business, so he’s got no reason to try anything freelance.

As all the reviews and blurbs recount, East and a small crew have to drive from L.A. to Wisconsin to kill a potential witness against a key player in the larger gang. So this turns into a road trip story with characters who have little experience of the places they’re headed. East is responsible in ways the others aren’t, and he tries to keep them on task despite distractions.

The tension here comes from our young protagonist growing into a sense of his own capacity. He isn’t ready for a mission this fraught at the start, but he’s someone older, more able at the end. We don’t know until the last moment whether they’ll be able to pull the hit off, and we don’t know for a good bit longer than that whether it was a crime worth committing.

If this is really just a crime novel, though, the ending is unsatisfying. [SPOILER] East, stranded in the Midwest, finds a new life for himself, helping operate a paintball factory in a decaying Ohio town. He’s back to watching, and he feels pretty good about himself. Then he discovers that someone he thought he thought was dead has returned, and he has a choice: go back to his old life or try for something new. That’s intriguing (and I’ve undersold it) but it isn’t quite ‘crime’ anymore.

So, while this is a good crime novel, it’s even better as something more, as an exploration of what it means to grow up in this 21st century America.

For starters, Beverly can flat out write. He has a peculiar, wonderful rhythm. It’s almost as if his sentences lope in that tough-guy performed way. It’s almost like reggae without the underlying hope and celebration. I took down these gems. “You think it’s the same out there? But you don’t know. It ain’t. Them police don’t budget on you. That’s their country. They love a little Negro boy.”

Or “Talking to Ty, you ended up knowing less than you started with. He took a pleasure in sharing nothing, enjoying nothing, a scrawny boy who’d almost starved as a baby, didn’t eat, didn’t play – failure to thrive, the relief doctor said. Smart but didn’t like school, fast but didn’t like running. Never cried as a baby, never asked questions. Never loved anything but guns.”

Beverly puts all of that prose in the service of telling his crime story, but also in the service of his more ambitious project. These are kids – and they really are kids, still in their early teens – who’ve inherited a world that offers them almost nothing.

It took me a while to figure out what’s so evocative in East’s name – purportedly short for Easton – and it finally hit me. Like Gatsby this is a story of the American dispossessed venturing, not West, but East. Our hero here is defined as someone trying to reverse the history of the country. His final conundrum is almost a literal take on American history: he can return West, return to the ‘boxes’ he’s always known, or he can try to venture further back into the coastal East, a world that represents the original promise of our culture.

L.A. may be home to East, but there’s something empty about it. Some of that is the violence he knows – he watches an innocent girl get shot in the early pages of the book – but some of that is an even more profound emptiness. His brother Ty, who experienced a “failure to thrive” as an infant, is perfectly suited to the place. But East, who longs for the chance to be loyal to something worthy of him, can’t find what he needs.

The ending that somewhat disappoints as part of a crime novel is compelling in this other context. Once Ty tracks him down at the end, the “center” (i.e. the Midwest of Ohio) cannot hold. East has to choose the L.A. he has always known, or the “East” for which he was inadvertently named. It’s a choice between an everyday despair that’s taught others to murder without qualm and an uncertain future that smacks of the American promise to reinvent ourselves.

There’s a lot to chew on at the end of this and, as much as I admire it, I think there’s a calculated sloppiness, almost a “lope” to the rhythm of the narrative. It’s compelling, and I enjoy it, but I’ll be curious to see what Beverly goes on to do. As many others have said, this is a spectacular debut in itself – and it’s been on my list since I first heard the reviews almost a year ago – one that seems to announce the start of an impressive career. Sign me up for Beverly’s next one, and certainly give this one a consideration.


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