| Review: Elmore Leonard THE HOT KID |
Listening to Elmore Leonard being interviewed on PBS persuaded me to go out and buy his latest, The Hot Kid. He said this book took a year to write, longer than any other. He felt some degree of kinship with the subject matter…the infamous bank robbers of the 1930s… describing a picture of himself as a child with one foot on a running board pointing a toy gun at the camera a la Clyde Darrow (or was that Bonnie Parker?). Leonard is 80. He sounds like someone you’d enjoy spending time with. And he’s had great success with his work, producing popular fiction that’s often engaging and shows a precise command of the craft. The Hot Kid kept me involved right to the end. Leonard has written this one with a super-hero style protagonist, the kind of man most men wish they were, and has given him enough style, wit, and humor to appeal to women, too. The female characters all reminded me of Tess Trueheart, but then what kind of women does one write to accompany the likes of Eliot Ness, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Dillinger? Wouldn’t they all have to have the heart of a gun moll? Leonard is a visual writer. You can see his scenes, his settings, his characters…their expressions, the way they move, what they’re thinking. (This book will make a great movie.) And it’s that ability, Leonard’s ability to create a world you believe, or at least one you’re willing to believe for as long as he asks, that readers and, especially, we writers have to tip our hats to. His characters live on the page, have bone, muscle, flesh. Their interactions are witty, funny, wry…the way we wish ours were every minute of every day. The good guys are good, the bad guys aren’t, but there are enough unexpected acts of viciousness and grace to keep things interesting, and most everyone gets what they deserve in the end, except for one or two who get less or more, which keeps things this side of real. Leonard writes great dialogue, but there’s a problem with it, at least in this book. Everyone talks the same way. It’s a punchy, amusing way of talking, an admirably efficient way, and it would be absolutely convincing if it belonged to only one character. But it doesn’t, and it gave me a real problem with The Hot Kid. There are a lot of characters in this book, a lot, and with few exceptions I was often not sure who was who. Not that it gave me great pause, because I was already on the ride and enjoying it enough to stay on, and eventually there was always some clue that got me back on track. Differentiation in voicing, though, would have helped. The ending is magnificent. If you have trouble with them, with endings, read this one and learn. It has not a word too many or too few. It simply ends, and lets the reader fill in the future.
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