Review by New York Times Review
In Nic Pizzolatto's first novel, a prostitute and a mob enforcer on the run hide out in East Texas. EVERY character we encounter in Nic Pizzolatto's first novel, "Galveston," is orphaned, disgorged by either a loved one or the sun-boiled landscapes of Texas and Louisiana. It's 1987. Roy Cady, a drunk in his early 40s, has just learned he has terminal lung cancer. Roy collects debts and occasionally kills people for Stan, a mob boss in New Orleans. But Stan has recently taken up with Roy's girlfriend, and Roy's continued existence now proves an irritant. When Stan sends Roy into an ambush, the intended killers are killed instead. Only Roy and a teenage prostitute, Raquel (Rocky) Arceneaux, survive. They flee Louisiana together and head for Texas. Rocky is not a terribly efficient hooker (she was just getting started), nor is she a terribly efficient person. She is "harassed by her own potential. . . . A stillness spread through her eyes, and her unguarded face forgot to play a role, just looked stunned by confusion and remorse, while the features of this face were organized by a kind of country pride that wouldn't admit confusion or remorse." In lesser hands, Rocky would be the hoariest of clichés, the goldhearted hooker who exists to remind the middle-aged Roy that his virility remains not only intact but formidable. Thankfully, Pizzolatto is after more here. Rocky, like Roy, is from the scrublands of Texas, a "rolling world of kudzu and bony trees and black water" that "seemed to mean something to her, the way it meant things to me. . . . The landscape had a gravity that tugged us backward in time, possessed us with people we used to be." Rocky and Roy pick up a third party - Tiffany, Rocky's 3-year-old sister, whom Rocky liberates from her grubby stepfather at gunpoint. The three wash up at Emerald Shores, a roadside motel a few blocks off the beach in Galveston. There they join a misfit collective of hard-luck cases, everyone running either from doom or toward it. Mostly toward it. "You're here because it's somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won't stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore." That passage, with its echoes of Richard Hugo's poem "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg" and James Crumley's novel "The Last Good Kiss," underscores a hallmark of American noir: the search for a past and a home less remembered than desired. The world of "Galveston" is a world in which "everyone who comes here is poor and a liar." The past is as much manufactured pipe dream as the future, both invented to numb the assaults of the present. But it's also here that Roy has a chance, however fleeting, however hopeless, to resurrect what little good still resides within. And so "Galveston" becomes something one didn't quite expect - a novel concerned with the spirit's reclamation, if not quite its redemption. The broken-toy souls of the Emerald Shores motel are united in weakness, loss and vague hope. As Roy notes, "all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction." At the Emerald Shores they include the owner, Nancy, a woman with "flesh so grooved and dehydrated it might have been cured in a smokehouse"; her ex-husband, Lance, who pines for her from the parking lot where he cooks the breakfast sausage and the afternoon burgers on his outdoor grill; Tray, a junkie thief who is the last person to grasp how outmatched he is in his fight against the world; two old sisters, Dehra and Nonie Elliot, who take a late-life shine to their own maternal instincts; and an unnamed redneck whose dawning realization of his own powerlessness manifests itself in terrible ways. Roy becomes, if not their leader, then a scarred totem around which they congregate. As go his fortunes, so go theirs, but lest we forget, Roy is a hit man with a terminal disease, and "Galveston" is a roman noir to its scuffed boot heels. If there's a guiding principle that whispers in the ear of every reader of great noir, it's this: Things will not end well. And they don't, but that doesn't mean moments of grace don't occur along the way. Those moments are usually personified by Tiffany and her adoption by the broken-toy collective. In this novel, it takes a deeply screwed-up village to raise a child. It's on behalf of Tiffany, and Rocky, that Roy decides to stick his head back out of his hole and force a day of reckoning with Stan, a gambit that turns the story's climax into an eruption of pitiless violence and endless regret. But also of hope, which shimmers like desert heat as the book draws to a close. The missteps in "Galveston," such as they are, occur early - especially in the first few chapters, which feel like pulp voyeurism more than pulp. Something similar afflicted whole novels recently by Thomas Pynchon and Denis Johnson, who paid a kind of condescending homage to a genre they didn't seem to understand fully. The reader discerned something studied in place of something felt, something approximated in place of something lived. Pizzolatto shows no contempt for the genre, but in the very early going he seems too self-conscious about its structural baggage. He dispenses with scenes hastily, getting them out of the way in a flurry of blood and viscera and hard-guy stares before releasing his threesome on the open road at a gallop. But once they hit that road - and they do, quickly - he settles into the book he wants to write, an often incandescent fever dream of low-rent, unbearable beauty. This could be because "Galveston" empathizes with its characters to a degree I'm hard pressed to recall in another recent novel. The addicted thief, the decaying mob boss, the sun-scorched Nancy who believes that the United Nations plans to invade Texas and that Louisiana would be a fine place were it not for all of the Catholics, even the blowhard redneck who ultimately beats his wife to death ("How helpless he'd seemed, and how you could tell that helplessness had made him cruel") - all are brought to life in the fullest blush of their frightened, addled humanity. By the end, the emotional honesty and power of the novel recall nothing of the scores of approximated noirs we've been subjected to over the past couple of decades, both on the page and on the screen. Instead, "Galveston," in its authenticity and fearless humanism, recalls only the finest examples of the form: Jacques Tourneur's "Out of the Past" and David Goodis's "Down There," Carl Franklin's "One False Move" and James Ellroy's "Black Dahlia." It's an elegy to the broken and the never-weres, to those who got themselves lost so that someone - anyone - might come looking. If there's a guiding principle that whispers in the ear of every noir fan, it's this: Things will not end well. Dennis Lehane's latest novel, "Moonlight Mile," will be published in November.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 18, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Pizzolatto, author of the short story collection Between Here and the Yellow Sea (2006), delivers a taut first novel suffused with a strong noir sensibility. Roy Cady is working as a strong-arm man for a low-level New Orleans gangster when two events change his life: he's diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his boss puts out a hit on him. Soon enough, Roy and a young prostitute, Rocky thrown together after a blood-spattered encounter with the would-be hit men are on the run, traveling from New Orleans to Galveston. Nothing ends well, Roy muses at one point, and, of course, we know from the start that this road trip is on a collision course with disaster. The inevitable downward arc of all noir can bring a certain dreary sameness to the proceedings, especially if the writer paints his disasters by the numbers, but Pizzolatto builds tension by moving back and forth in time: we know it all goes bad, but we don't know how. Add to that a writer with a real feel for the special poetry of noir, and you have a fine crime-fiction debut.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pizzolatto, author of the story collection Between Here and the Yellow Sea, takes a hard-edged look at the stormy life of a compassionate criminal in his impressive first novel. On the same day in 1987 he's diagnosed with lung cancer, Roy Cady flees New Orleans, taking along Raquel "Rocky" Arceneaux, a pretty 18-year-old with a lurid past, whom he rescues from some hoods in the wake of a bloodbath. Rocky persuades him to stop in Orange, Tex., to pick up Tiffany, her three-year-old sister, and by the time they reach refuge in a rundown Galveston motel, 40-year-old Roy finds himself an unlikely father figure even as he struggles with a romantic attraction to Rocky. Pizzolatto's insightful portrayal of the heroic Roy, who takes a beating for trying to help the two girls, is rough and tumble real. As Pizzolatto switches smoothly between past and present, he vividly captures Galveston in all its desperate vulnerability as it faces the approach of Hurricane Ike in September 2008. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
For a mob enforcer and a teenage whore on the run, there's no escaping the violent past; this first novel follows a story collection (Between Here and the Yellow Sea, 2006). Violence shadowed Roy Cady's childhood in East Texas. His alcoholic father fell to his death; his mother killed herself. She had worked for a bar owner and racketeer, and at 17 Roy started working for him too. Eventually he moved to New Orleans and became the muscle for another racketeer, Stan Ptitko. Now it's 1987, and 40-year-old Roy is reeling from a lung-cancer diagnosis; he's convinced it's terminal. Stan sends him to intimidate a corrupt union official, but it's a setup; Stan wants him dead. Roy survives a furious shootout and flees, taking along blond 18-year-old Rocky, another Texan. She's a runaway who's just started turning tricks. Driving west, she persuades Roy to stop at a secluded cabin and emerges with her baby sister Tiffany. Here the story line frays as we peek into Roy's future; 20 years on, he's a cancer survivor, rendering pointless his earlier end-of-life crisis. And the fast-forward doesn't resolve Pizzolatto's dilemmawhether to write a pulpy crime story or a tale of the spiritual salvation of an ex-con. It seems like the latter as Roy plays the Good Samaritan, checking the girls into a Galveston motel. But then he drives to Dallas for a reunion with an old flame, now happily married. It's a devastating encounter. Shrewd, mature Loraine demolishes Roy's romantic memories, recalling him as an angry, jealous, resentful lover. Back in Galveston, the crime element resurfaces. Roy strangles a motel neighbor, a junkie and potential blackmailer. He then tries some blackmail himself, threatening Stan; his weapon is some incriminating paperwork he'd retrieved from that New Orleans crime scene. The result is catastrophic, for Roy and Rocky both. An unsatisfying split-personality novel redeemed by some terrific dialogue. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
