Review: Every Man a Menace

Every Man a Menace by Patrick Hoffman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hoffman does two clever and rewarding things in this one, but he balances those excellences with a less-than-perfect prose style. The result is that this is a strong book, but not quite as memorable as its best elements suggested.

For starters, Hoffman is clever in the way he takes a conventional, chronological narrative, tears it into strips, and feeds it back to us as a fragmented story that comes together. It’s a terrific structure, and I admire it.

Even more, I admire Hoffman’s fearlessness here. I need to start with a [SPOILER], but he’s as effective at killing off his point-of-view characters as anyone I can think of. We open with a lengthy chapter from the perspective of Raymond Gaspar, a down-on-his-luck ex-con just out and grasping at a longshot chance to strike it rich. We’re introduced through him to what promises to be the biggest shipment of ecstasy in recent San Francisco history. And then he gets killed. It’s so unexpected, so cold-blooded, that I have to cheer.

And, [SPOILER #2], then he does it again, killing off another character we’re supposed to be sympathetic towards. Semyon, is a young guy who’s farther up the ecstasy-supply chain, but he’s likeable enough. Like Raymond, though, he’s unwittingly in the way of someone else. And that’s that.

Those two virtues work hand in hand. [SPOILER, cont.] You can’t kill off central characters mid-story unless you have new perspective from which to continue. So, all in all, I’m impressed with Hoffman’s technical solution to a challenging problem.

All that said, though, this one makes me miss the quality of the prose in the best noir. Ellroy is an extreme example – you can take any skilled practitioner like Daniel Woodrell, James Crumley, Megan Abbott, or Ken Bruen – but you know with each sentence that you’re into a different kind of narrative. It isn’t necessarily poetry, but it’s something different from the normal.

So, my big complaint with Hoffman is that the prose here is “normal.” If the best noir has the feel of metered verse, this is unmetered. It’s “unrhythmic” in the sense that it has an enduring matter-of-fact tone at all times.

I listened to this, and I think the narrator was unusually weak, but I do think there’s something not-quite about the way Hoffman tells us his story. If the essence of noir is that something is hardboiled – that it gives the impression that difficult experiences have boiled away the softness – this feels like a fresh egg. Maybe it makes sense that the prose implies a softness in a story that [again, SPOILER] kills off so many protagonist figures, but I couldn’t help feeling that this excellently plotted story never quite caught the music it should have.




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