Unlike When Will There be Good News? , Don Winslow's The Winter of Frankie Machine has no literary pretensions. It's a straight thriller, and a pitch-perfect one.
It starts very slowly, as we spend 30 pages following the eponymous Frankie around his day; he starts in his bait shop, then checks in on the two other businesses he runs, has lunch with his daughter, and so on with a quotidian day. These pages are important because they introduce us to Frank; he's persnickety, it's easy to push his buttons by referring to past obligations, and he's obsessive about preparedness.
In the next 10 pages, Frank is contacted by old mafia associates and then nearly assassinated. From there, the tension stays at that high point while frank tries to determine who might want him dead. Now those first 30 pages bear fruit, as Frank's actions all grow organically out of the personality we were introduced to at the beginning.
The result is not great literature, surely, but it's a thriller with no false steps along the way, and that's not an easy achievement. The most similar book I've read recently was Point of Impact, also a novel about a man being pursued by a large conspiracy, needing all his wits to escape. I liked Point of Impact a lot, but Frankie Machine really points up the weaknesses of the former book and makes me downgrade a bit in retrospect; it makes me realize that Point of Impact hits its target, but Frankie Machine is a dead center bulls-eye. Although it turns out that Frank is not the well-oiled machine that his name suggests (and the book would be less interesting if he were), this book certainly is.
No comments:
Post a Comment