GALVESTON by Nic Pizzolatto

It’s a disservice to call Nic Pizzolatto’s GALVESTON “noir” or “hard-boiled.” There is plenty of sex and violence and disillusionment, but it’s delivered in a poetic, romanticized way with a finer degree of self-awareness and introspection than is typical of hard-boiled crime fiction. GALVESTON is a genre-bender, a work of literary fiction with noir/crime elements, but the noirish aspects act as bookends to the litfic core: a story of a man confronting mortality and seeking redemption through love.

Roy Cady is a sensitive and self-aware anti-hero with a big mushy heart. He was orphaned young and spent most of his life as a hitman, punctuated by intense, idealized romances. At age 40, he’s told he has small-cell carcinoma of the lung. But his boss seems intent on snipping his thread short even sooner than the cancer will do him in. When a hit goes horribly wrong, Roy finds himself on the run from his boss with a teenage prostitute and her baby sister improbably in tow.

GALVESTON touches on plenty of cliché themes: mid-life crisis after terminal illness diagnosis; middle-aged man attracted to a much younger woman; the endless cycle of violence; the abused and abandoned meeting tragic ends. What makes GALVESTON so compelling is the compassionate lens through which Pizzolatto views his characters. Despite his loneliness and long stew in violence, Roy hasn’t become completely hardened to life. He experiences the world with a poet’s eyes and heart. Pizzolatto shows Roy coming to life in the girls’ company without dipping into sentimentality. The relationship between Roy and teenager Rocky is beautifully drawn, precariously teetering between the sexual and platonic—a lifetime’s worth of interaction compressed into the span of a few days.

I’m uncomfortable calling GALVESTON “noir” because, even while describing visceral violence or the seamy underbelly of the Deep South, the prose thrums and resonates with a joie de vivre that elevates it above the cynicism and nihilism of noir. Pizzolatto’s prose is lush and reminiscent of literary thriller writer James Lee Burke. Even at the most violent and hopeless moments, Pizzolatto plucks out the poetry and scatters it effortlessly across the scene.

(I wondered if the “Robicheaux” mentioned in GALVESTON was a tip of the hat to Burke.)

Despite the inevitably tragic ends of many of its characters, I finished GALVESTON feeling uplifted, left with an impression that hope can bloom even in the darkest and seediest corners of the earth.

BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP by S.J. Watson

BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP follows a middle-aged London housewife whose memories of the past 20-odd years get wiped clean every time she sleeps. Christine wakes up every morning next to a husband she can’t remember, and a house, life, and body that are completely foreign to her.

Watson builds the suspense well, hinting that various characters are lying to Christine as she tries to piece together the mystery of how she lost her memories and what has happened to her over the past two decades. Unfortunately, the “twists” are too blatantly telegraphed. When the big reveal comes at the end, the villain abruptly sheds all complexity and becomes a bumbling, one-dimensional brute. Watson appears to have had concerns about making the villain too sympathetic and does a 180 in the final pages, lest we forget the bad guy’s twoo eeeeevil.

The conclusion is regrettably reminiscent of Lifetime TV. Emotional and physical abuse against women is serious and all too common, but Watson doesn’t explore this topic with intelligence and sensitivity. Rather, the abuse issue seems tacked on at the end, used as a shock tactic and to demonize the villain.

The prose is enjoyable—clear and concise, with occasional inspired imagery: “I put [the book] underneath my coat, where, all the way home, it beat like a heart.” Watson establishes and ramps up the suspense skillfully, making the novel compulsively readable (I had to finish it in one sitting).

Characterization is where the novel is weakest. There is little sense of the characters as people. In amnesiac Christine’s case, this is understandable—one of the most interesting questions the novel poses is, “Who are we without our memories?” She’s a cipher who gradually builds a new identity for herself, discovering herself along with the reader. Yet other characters inexplicably share her blandness and blankness, without the excuse of being afflicted by amnesia.

A solid if predictable suspense/thriller.