princess quick on the orgasmic draw but she’s just as quick to sum up the threat posed by the Baja cartel’s desire to scoop up all parts of the marijuana trade (“They’re like Wal-Mart”) and well aware that she takes the easy way out because she can. Ben and Chon might be opposite in personality, but together they make millions producing chart-busting pot so potent that inhalation several degrees removed from the source produces serious contact highs. Winslow buffs the surface to high gloss only to dirty things up pretty fast. From a distance the characters seem like cutouts: Ben, the do-gooder, the pacifist, the son of two psychiatrists with a yen to fix Third World countries with cash infusions Chon, the stone-cold veteran of several tours of Iraq and Afghanistan with a permanent case of PTLOSD (“Post Traumatic Lack of Stress Disorder”) and O, the blue-streaked blond they both love and who loves both with equal verve, who shops constantly out of boredom and fends off advances from the latest husband of her fad-obsessed mother, nicknamed PAQU (“Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe”). Those who meet the novel’s brash standards will also meet the trio of twentysomethings who navigate the stylized nouveau terrain that is Orange County. If not, you’re not “Savages’” ideal reader, and it’s no great loss. If you cackle out loud, you may proceed to Chapter 2. To get to that semi-ecstatic point, one must first pass Winslow’s cheeky intelligence test, a two-word opening chapter that cannot, alas, be repeated in a family newspaper. The rationale - mine, anyway - is that if newcomers are sucked in by the fierce narrative velocity and perpetual peppering of aphorism upon biting aphorism, each will realize what Winslow fans have long known and will reach for the writer’s back catalog. “Savages” is both a departure and a culmination, pyrotechnic braggadocio and deep meditation on contemporary American culture.Īll those reasons, however, justify foisting “Savages” into the hands of Winslow unfamiliars.
There’s a delicious sense of satisfaction in seeing how Winslow has chiseled his increasingly lean prose to diamond-like precision over the course of 12 novels and fused the themes of “The Power of the Dog” (2005), his epic account of the country’s never-ending war on drugs, with the razzmatazz syntax of his surf-detective novel “The Dawn Patrol” (2008) to produce something heady and new. I’m of two minds about whether “Savages,” Don Winslow’s marvelous, adrenaline-juiced roller coaster of a novel, is a rookie reader’s best introduction to his work.
0 kommentar(er)
