Charlie Stella’s ‘Cheapskates’ reviewed by Ryan van Runkle

Reviews No Responses »
Oct 112011

Charlie Stella’s fourth novel, Cheapskates, is low-rent mob behaviour at its best. If following the lives of New Jersey underworld scum for three hundred pages isn’t your idea of a good date, well, think again. There is much in this medium sized book to heighten your awareness of life – or even just to make you laugh.

Cheapskates follows Reese Waters as he navigates the Nation of Islam, the New Jersey Mob, and his best friend’s ex-wife – a woman who behaves as if she were spawned by Bernie Madoff and Rush Limbaugh. Cheapskates is full of seriously talented prose. Witness:

“Alex had just finished having sex with his girlfriend, Christine Molloy, a forty-five-year-old diner waitress from Croton-on-Hudson. Alex was thirty-eight years old, a little paunchy since he’d stopped smoking, and showing his first serious signs of balding. He turned his head from side to side in the mirror as he searched for new signs of hair loss.

‘Yikes, it’s cold in here!’ Christine yelled from the bathroom doorway.

Shivering, she pulled a bathrobe around her shoulders and sprinted across the hotel room to jump into bed. Alex wasn’t prepared for the gymnastics and spilled some soda on his chest.

‘Sheee-it,’ he said. ‘Are you crazy?’

Christine quickly dabbed at the soda spill with a napkin. She dispensed with the napkin and began to lick his chest. Alex pulled away.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Take a Valium or something. I need some time here.’

Christine bit her lower lip to shape her best seductive smile. She was still attractive despite the hard life she’d led. Except for a few blotches of cellulite on the backs of her legs and rump, some stretch marks around her nipples, and a few faint acne scars, she continued to turn heads, especially when her very large breasts were held together with a bra.

Licking her lips as she spoke, she told Alex, ‘I was hoping to speed your trip, baby.’”

This is exciting stuff. And though Christine has only one other scene – she gets blackout drunk at a restaurant – she’s my favourite character. She reminds me of another Molloy, as imagined by the Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. In the final novel of Beckett’s trilogy, he writes: “And that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage.” Well, America, we did the mob thing and the corporate crime thing and the empire thing. What next? Where are we speeding to? And, perhaps most importantly, is it possible to take the Christine’s of this world with us?

Cheapskates is a fun book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in quirky and illicit lifestyles. I think it would be a good fit for anyone who does shift work or is unemployed. (Read: I think it would be a good fit for all of us.)

Posted by Len Wanner at 6:23 am Tagged with: , ,

Wallace Stroby’s ‘Cold Shot to the Heart’ reviewed by Ryan van Runkle

Reviews No Responses »
Jul 172011

Wallace Stroby’s latest novel, Cold Shot to the Heart, is part gangster movie, part atmospheric thriller. At the centre of the story is Crissa Stone, a half-Mary, half-Magdalene like figure, specializing in armed robbery and sometimes motherhood. When Crissa gets involved with a crew looking to take-off a high end card game in a glitzy, Miami beach-front hotel, the caper’s fallout provides the novel’s anecdotal burst.

Stroby writes a compulsive prose, peppered with short, staccato sentences. He relishes in describing physical fact: “Reynoldo, the doorman, came out to greet her. She paid the driver cash, tipped him twenty dollars, heard the trunk click open.” Writing like this is about momentum and information; the writing doesn’t absorb emotion; rather, in a kind of tricked out Cormac McCarthy fashion, it absorbs the little processes of the physical world. “She steadied the .38 in her right hand, gripped the pen-light with her left, wrists crossed, thumb on the button. Her finger tightened on the trigger. No time to cock it. To fire, she’d have to take the long double action pull, hope she was quick enough.”

At core, Cold Shot to the Heart is a novel about disappointment; the disappointment and fatigue underpinning any criminal lifestyle. What Stroby does best is articulate that disappointment by describing the constant uncertainty of crime, the toll of living on adrenaline 24/7 – and, ultimately, the frustrations of choosing a world, and a profession, of ever decreasing options: “It had become a pattern. A few months of normalcy, relaxation. Then the money at hand would start to run low around the same time she began to get bored. She’d wait for word, a call from Kansas City or St. Louis or Phoenix or a dozen other cities. She’d hear what they had to say. Then, more often than not, she’d be working again – and the cycle would start over. It didn’t make for much of a future, she knew. But now it was the only life she could stand to live.”

Cold Shot to the Heart is a short and compelling read, easily devoured in one sitting. It’s a ferocious narrative, hopefully furthering Wallace Stroby’s position as a writer of note in the world of crime fiction.

Posted by Len Wanner at 7:55 am Tagged with: , ,
© 2012 The Crime of it All Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha