The Crime of it All

With just enough bite and charm to keep the reader engaged, American Skin is a cartoon crime thriller one part Stephen King, one part Karen Slaughter, all conceived through an Irish lens. The plot revolves around a bank heist gone wrong, its desperate aftermath taking our protagonist Stephen Blake from Ireland to New York and finally journeying deep into America’s heartland. The book’s chapters are short, to-the-point and easily digested; it soon becomes clear that things are aligning towards an epic showdown between Blake and his nemesis, the psychotic speedfreak Dade. There’s a touch of the Western to American Skin; the Byronic hero headed for the inevitable fall and subsequent empty absolution, the unrepentantly monstrous vision of crime and criminality, the innocent girl caught up in an outlaw world. While sometimes charming, such broad swathes tend to come from a limited palette, which occasionally catches in an irritating manner.

Given the title, it’s ironically the Irish experience which seems most convincingly vital, whilst the coarse Americana which peppers the text comes across as a tad forced. The Irish voices work well, for the main part, persuasively vivid and full of cultural references as they are. Unsurprising, given that Bruen’s a Galway native. Yet with the book published in the U.S. and having a title seemingly chosen to attract an American audience, it feels as though written for an expressly American readership. Disappointing then that the American dialogue is not entirely convincing.

Bruen is at his best when flippantly detailing Republican hardman Stapleton’s murderous cavorting around Antrim, or Blake’s arsing about with a vengeance in the British army. It’s obvious that the author is having the time of his life writing such characters, and this is where the novel really shines. Bruen succeeds in assembling a fine battalion of amusing personalities: Dade is an arch-villain of the highest order, pure badness, a nihilistic cartoon fruitcake and fun to tolerate. Sherry, the ice-cold she-wolf, is superb, and deserving of a bigger part in the narrative. The New York section of the book works best when laced with anecdotes of Steve’s slain pal Tommy, and the author does a fine job of imparting the immigrant’s sense of wonder, the clean-slate scream of freedom, of infinite possibility and lack of consequence.

Yet Bruen overplays this trump card, indulging in unnecessary explanations of Irish terms despite the inclusion of a light-heartedly whimsical glossary. This leads one to notice just how thick the ‘Oirishness’ is laid on; considering that the novel is written primarily for an American audience, it’s perhaps understandable…yet galling nonetheless. An out-and-out dyed-in-the-wool Belfast native would neither pronounce the word Jesus in the phonetic “Jaysus” of the text, nor would he use the term “yokes”. Similarly irritating are a number of textual, phrasal and phonetic errors, beginning on page two with the phrase “beaten her to an inch of her life”. The text is full of odd metaphors and clunky similes; we’re told that our protagonist “veered twixt the two like a nun on a bicycle” or was “happy as a pig in a basket”. Were such phrases to occur just once or twice, they’d be unremarkable. Yet with their continual inclusion, the text soon becomes hammy and clichéd, inviting dismissal. Repeating “that’s all she wrote” to underscore a significant event would be irritating were it to occur only twice in the entire novel; twice within a couple of chapters invites derision.

The strangest element here is that the story begins to run out of steam just on the cusp of the grand finale, with Bruen delaying the final conflict through idiosyncratically irrelevant sidelines such as literal descriptions from episodes of Friends or The Sopranos, featureless repetitions of points already well made and an irritating tendency to recycle initially endearing textual devices: “I didn’t know, said, ‘I don’t know’.”

What really comes across is that the author could have done with a tough editor to straighten out the seams, or at the very least correct typos. Time and again Bruen breaks the golden rule: show, don’t tell. It’s completely disruptive of the story’s flow and catches a little harder on each successive occasion, which is a real pity, as the characters and story are decent. To put it in the author’s own words, “he was, to coin a phase [sic], a little too loose a cannon’.

In American Skin‘s favour, it’s addictively compulsive reading, and you’ll wolf down the chapters like Dade does pills, streaking through the book in a day or three. The plot is built with care and a finely-developed sense of poise and timing, and Bruen’s strength is an audacious aptitude for taking imaginatively conceived characters and shunting them into barely credible yet enjoyable situations. The local colour is convincing, the weight of experience evident, and such elements are perfectly capable of standing alone; as such, it’s utterly unnecessary to quantify a phrase like ‘an Irish measure’ with the parenthesised ‘(generous)’ when describing the pouring of a drink, an exercise which is patronising at best.

Essentially, American Skin does not read like a finished draft. The final act rushes by in a barely fleshed-out tying-up of loose ends rather than the bombastic shoot-out everyone’s waiting for, and everything ends unsatisfactorily. If you’re going to play by the clichés, it’s just not kosher to revoke them all at the last minute. Ultimately, this is an airport kiosk novel. It does have its charms, but plot inconsistencies and a disarmingly lax approach to detail let down what is an otherwise solid crime thriller.