Review: Meyer

Meyer by Jonathan Lang
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve been “off” graphic novels for a while now, without quite knowing why. This one is not going to change that trend.

As someone who writes about Jews in organized crime, I figured I almost had to read this one. It’s described as a late-career imagining of Meyer Lansky, and it’s even blurbed by Lansky’s grandson, Meyer Lansky II. So I figured it had to be interesting as history.

Well, no. It isn’t.

Apart from a handful of references that you might get out of a Wikipedia article, there’s little insight into the nature of Lansky’s long and intriguing criminal career. Our fictional Lansky here spits out clichés about how to be tough and how to outsmart others, but none have any particular links to the particular experiences of the man.

There’s even a small point when, talking to a young Cuban Jewish immigrant he’s befriended, he says, “You look a little like Bugsy.” The reference is to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, but – as anyone who’s read Robert Lacey’s masterful biography of Lansky should know – Siegel’s friends were scrupulous in calling him “Ben.” That’s minor, I know, but when a man is as secretive as Lansky was, it seems we ought to respect the handful of quirks we know about when we try to imagine him in history.

And, besides, I figured, this didn’t have to be history. If it were a good story, it wouldn’t matter if it departed from the historical record.

Well, it isn’t.

For reasons we never learn, Lansky opens the novel living incognito in a retirement home. Then, for reasons that we learn only vaguely, he determines to take part in some crime (is it recovering a sunken load of heroin? Is it taking out the local “Godmother” of Cuban smuggling? Is it accomplishing something for his one-time protégé “Legs” Friedman?) which will obscurely qualify him for citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return.

As all that suggests, I’m unpersuaded by the premises and ultimately uninterested in the outcome. It makes no sense to me why this character had to be Lansky – why not an invented aging Jewish gangster – and then it makes no sense to me that he’s doing what he does.

With all that, I’m not in love with the illustrations either. I like the way they evoke a time and place – Miami in the early 1980s – and I like the story’s general evocation of that world as well.

In the end, though, I’m just not hooked by this one, and I think it may be a while before I give another graphic novel a shot.


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