The American Comedy
LENZNER, STEVEN
Summer Fiction Westlake • Roth • Lodge • Updike • Russo The American Comedy Donald Westlake: mystery writer, wit, philosopher. BY STEVEN LENZNER Plato, as everyone knows, once defined man as a...
...Can one find a better and wittier shorthand description of contemporary American aspirations...
...Presented with another chance—by breaking into jail—Dortmunder is persuaded to try again by his temperamental opposite and ambiguous friend, Andrew Octavian Kelp...
...During that period, he's also written twenty-three novels under the name "Richard Stark" (four starring Alan Grofield, a charming actor and occasional thief who is worthy of revival...
...The Dortmunder stories form perhaps the only series of its sort in which the later books are every bit as fresh as the early ones...
...ambassador of Tal-abwo to "rescue" the emerald from the Akinzi...
...My Uncle Al was right...
...It sought to establish "Little Feather Redcorn" as the last of the Pottaknobbee and, as such, entitled to one-third of the profits of a casino on a reservation...
...The mob expects Charlie to lose money, and he lives up to expectations...
...It's rude...
...The latter is the story of Fred Fitch, born victim and magnet to swindlers of all stripes...
...As Westlake asks, "Why remember fail-ures...
...Hit songs from the show include "Oh, Tell, Othello, Oh, Tell," and "Iago, My Best Friend," and the foot-stomping finale, "Here's the Handkerchief...
...Every single relative [Matt] had reviled and snubbed him----As Mother said, 'A lot of people would have treated Matt a heap different if they had known, believe you me.' I believed her...
...Westlake is more than simply a clever, unfailingly amusing, and inventive author...
...The attorney, not having learned his lesson, shortly thereafter makes a memorable statement that almost provided the book's title: "'I've heard of the habitual criminal, of course,' Prosker said pleasantly, 'but this may be the first instance in the history of the world of a habitual crime.'" At the last minute Westlake decided to change The Habitual Crime to The Hot Rock...
...To laugh at everything that one is today forbidden to laugh at is the essence of his intention...
...Smoke is a light and airy crime novel with a twist...
...Wouldn't it be a wonderful world in which no one died young, everyone got along, and things always worked out...
...Dortmunder's shopping after hours seems almost respectable...
...It was a plan that should have worked...
...These early experiments didn't necessarily lead Westlake to look at criminal things comically, but their range prefigures the turn he made in 1965 with the story of Charlie Poole, The Fugitive Pigeon...
...The Hot Rock follows Dortmunder's efforts to steal the Balabomo Emerald, sacred object to two small African countries, temporarily on display in New York...
...Why undergo the risks of escape when you can have a pleasant day in town and a nice, safe prison bed at night...
...The most amusing are Smoke, Help I am Being Held Prisoner, and Two Much...
...He never demands more than an equal share of the loot, thus demonstrating why from a certain perspective—that of their own common good—a prudent gang of thieves is the best social order...
...Yet Dort-munder does not abuse his power...
...Continue to persevere...
...What makes Levine such a compelling character is his very seriousness about that which is most serious: his mortality...
...He blames neither his associates nor the gods...
...You might not realize this if you go to see What's the Worst That Could Happen?, currently showing in theaters...
...Men do...
...He hadn't, however, counted upon one of his wives witnessing the murder...
...Comedy ignores certain rules at its own risk, and Two Much too quickly transforms itself from slightly bent light comedy to dark comedy, thereby losing a considerable degree of its charm...
...I stole it from some people uptown...
...Dort-munder is not the underdog for whom everybody roots...
...Yet even he cannot tell a tale solely about human ugliness that doesn't partake of that which it depicts...
...One encounters tough broads and babes as well as sophisticated ladies—but they are identifiably broads, babes, and ladies...
...Did you earn it...
...There is a typical form to the tales...
...Yet his confederates don't immediately share the "boodle...
...Unlike that under-dog—invariably less talented than his opponent—Dortmunder deserves to succeed...
...So, too, Dortmunder is unfailingly loyal to his friends and colleagues as well as his faithful companion, the long suffering May...
...Far more appropriate would have been the epigraph to the Parker novel Comeback: "The outcome you have waited for is assured...
...For instance," he was saying, "the money I got in my jeans this minute, where do you suppose I got it...
...Yet he is also a man of a certain pride...
...West-lake conceived of The Hot Rock's storyline as a Parker adventure: "What if he had to steal the same thing over and over again...
...Parker is an amoral killer with a peculiar sense of justice...
...Dort-munder occasionally even rises to Shakespearean eloquence: "If this thing was gonna get done, it was better that it got itself done soonest...
...As Thomas Aquinas taught, some things lie outside the scope of human knowledge, but others do not...
...You didn't earn this money...
...We're just riding Little Feather's coattails...
...Dort-munder is inured to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...
...Informed it was Leo Strauss, the ex-con replied, "He has the look of a man planning a break"—a description that delighted Strauss...
...Westlake deserves credit for making such stories compelling...
...Parker cannot abide being cheated by his fellow "mechanics...
...Westlake originally concluded The Hunter with Parker's death...
...I'm a thief...
...Westlake's most impressive early work was Levine, a series of short stories about Abe Levine, a middle-aged homicide detective with heart trouble...
...Westlake's writings are a refreshing antidote to all that makes us afraid to laugh...
...So who's right, ironic Plato or solid Aristotle...
...Though not unsympathetic, they are identifiably gay, typically somewhat effete and affected...
...They had come to kill him, but through good fortune and ingenuity spurred by necessity, Charlie escapes...
...The setup for a perfect escape, no...
...I've had enough...
...I think of myself as a person with a certain dignity and a certain professional ability and a certain standing, but what's happening here is I'm looking for crumbs from somebody else's table, so why am I here...
...Or to use a phrase of Machiavelli's, Westlake seeks to look at all things sanza alcuno rispetto, "without any respect...
...The Anastasia Dortmunder stumbled into was conceived by gifted confidence man Fitzroy Guilderpost...
...Fueled by betrayal, Parker procures the means necessary to meet his erstwhile partners under rather different circumstances...
...A most respectable crime," to use the words of one of my teachers...
...I'm not a grafter...
...Rejecting the idea as too comic for Parker, Westlake needed a new leading man, one whose fatalism would temper his frustration: "Who was this guy—dogged but doomed...
...The novel relates Fred's problems upon inheriting $317,000 from black sheep Uncle Matt...
...Chi-nese Fortune Cookie...
...Dortmunder's own beginnings were remarkably unpromising: "Born in Dead Indian, Illinois, and abandoned at three minutes of age, John Dortmunder had been raised in an orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery...
...Yet halfway through writing the first story, Westlake "ran out of steam," abandoning Dortmunder to a closet— which would have deprived the world of the German contribution to humor —and promptly forgetting him...
...Pity Him Afterwards is the tale of a nameless madman intent on destroying his medical tormentors, and The Ax is a chronicle of an everyman's descent into mass murder...
...Bad News is the eleventh Dort-munder tale since Westlake created him in 1970 (ten novels and the short story "Too Many Crooks...
...Get a job," he said, "or get a gun...
...For Westlake the besetting vice today is moralism, that disposition that leads one to seek to silence those with whom one disagrees...
...But don't beg...
...Bad News opens with a late-night burglary: "Speedshop was a great sprawling mass-production retailer stocked mostly with things that weren't worth a quarter and didn't cost more than four dollars...
...He can't laugh at me...
...What's more, The Hot Rock, the first Dortmunder adventure, has just been reissued in paperback with a new preface recounting the ambiguous genesis of this singular character...
...Parker and some colleagues engage in a lucrative, illicit, and often violent enterprise, which leaves little to chance...
...When flush, he never begrudges friends in need: "If he had it, they could have it, and the kind of people they were, they'd take his two hundred dollars and go directly to jail...
...He was led to that path by the conventional mystery...
...Westlake is the anti-Hemingway, who—by not taking himself too seriously—teaches us not to take ourselves too seriously...
...An Anastasia is an attempt to establish a line of descent for fraudulently obtaining an inheritance...
...That's something Westlake understands in the hardboiled crime novels about Parker he writes as "Richard Stark...
...His true peers are such great American humorists as Mark Twain and Ring Lardner and such great American crime novelists as Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, and Raymond Chandler...
...The virtues Dortmunder shows in all of his tales are worth considering...
...As Andy Kelp summarizes the plot of Bad News: "John and Tiny and me got involved with some people doing an Anastasia, and we need a right DNA sample, and it's gonna be on a comb in a place with hundreds of thousands of dollars of valuable stuff, so while we're there anyway, why don't we take it all...
...Still, it is the Dortmunder stories that one remembers and returns to...
...Westlake was not originally a comic novelist...
...It is the rare occasion when he resorts to violence, never unprovoked or excessive...
...To get a sense of Kelp's character it is enough to consider his initials, upon which Dort-munder could very well choke...
...Though not Parker's most lucrative payday, it's not bad for an afternoon's crime...
...For a contrast, consider Baron Chase in West-lake's Kahawa, "a man so steeped in his villainy that the evidences of his evil now only amused him...
...Did you risk anything...
...It needlessly complicates things...
...Charlie is a master of the art of laziness, whose Uncle Al, a mid-level mobster, found him "the perfect job"— running a money-laundering mob bar...
...Through no fault of his, it didn't, and Dortmunder reacts with characteristic resignation...
...Dortmunder embodies the superior dignity of the thoughtful, and his associates recognize his natural authority...
...Though the comedy of manners isn't Westlake's bailiwick, A Likely Story wonderfully captures the character—and characterless-ness—of romantic love and its impediments in modern America, including the often unforgivable vice of failing to appreciate what one has until one no longer has it...
...The most unsatisfying, Pity Him Afterwards and The Ax, are journeys into the minds of the criminally mad...
...Parker was not intended to be a series character...
...Unlike Dort-munder's, Parker's difficulties don't arise from fortune's malice...
...Though God Save the Mark is told from the victim's viewpoint, one senses Westlake's sympathy for the cleverness exhibited by Fred's foes...
...An author can maintain such a standard only if he never stops delighting in writing and thinking...
...Dortmunder's colleague Tiny Bulcher—"a man mountain who mostly looks like a fairy tale character that eats villages"—gives memorable voice to this way of life in What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Tiny was explaining to a panhandler why it had been rude to ask Tiny for money...
...Thus is born Bart Dodge...
...it tells the story of a thief who accidentally ingests a combination of experimental formulae that render him invisible—a formlessness as personally unsettling as it is professionally useful...
...Westlake thereby intuits Kant's dictum: "The problem of establishing the good social order is soluble even for a nation of devils, provided they have sense...
...After a faculty lunch, that candidate asked who had been sitting across from him...
...Since Parker was not a prime candidate for divine resurrection, Westlake rewrote the ending, and the series was off and running...
...Instead, they invite Parker to use that haul as seed money for a more spectacular heist they have planned—one requiring their robbery's entire proceeds...
...Westlake's plots invariably defy brief recapitulation...
...They are incredulous at Charlie's incomprehension: "What a nephew...
...Parker declines...
...He is an author of a wholly different rank...
...No less amusing, but less satisfactory, is Two Much, the story of Art Dodge, a moderately successful writer of humorous greeting cards with an overactive imagination and an over-active libido...
...This is a particularly timely lesson...
...Did you work hard...
...Fortunately, one of the things that lies within the reach of human knowledge is the fact that the writings of Donald E. Westlake constitute an American treasure...
...That he does not isn't a reflection on him, but his luck...
...He would be the poster criminal for the dictum "Don't get mad, get even" were it not that his maxim is better formulated as "Don't get mad, kill them...
...BY STEVEN LENZNER Plato, as everyone knows, once defined man as a "featherless biped...
...Upon learning that Elizabeth had a twin sister, Elisabeth, Art declares, to his future dismay: "I'm twins too...
...In the following five years, Westlake wrote several novels exploring the genre, all of which stand the test of time...
...Consider his description of the hit show Desde-mona!, the feminist musical version of the world-famous love story, slightly altered for the modern American taste (everybody lives...
...That's a miscalculation...
...But precisely the opposite is true: Westlake expresses his serious thoughts in comedy because it is truer and healthier to see what is laughable about the typical, the everyday...
...Yet it is precisely not his intention to offend, but to show us ourselves in such a way as to make us less likely to take offense: For example, though Westlake is not hostile to religion, he finds humor in places—monasteries (Brother's Keepers) and convents (Good Behavior)—typically uncongenial to comic treatment...
...As Tiny puts it: "Wherever there's a lot of money, Dortmunder, there's always sooner or later some use for the guy who does the thinking, which is you, and the guy who does the heavy lifting, which is me...
...Thus it isn't surprising that in the most recent tales, Dortmunder's fortunes have changed for the better...
...Perhaps to vindicate the dictum that new things are noble because they are difficult, West-lake burdened himself with an entirely misleading epigraph from Nietzsche: "The criminal is the type of strong man in unfavorable surroundings, the strong man made sick...
...Westlake preferred the title The Dead Nephew, but was overruled by his editor, who forbade authors from employing "death" in a title...
...He then began experimenting with more unconventional perspectives...
...Somehow this ending leaves a bad taste in one's mouth...
...It was hard work, and there was some risk in it, and I earned it...
...Though his first novels, The Mercenaries and Killing Time, were well crafted, they remained within established boundaries...
...His student Aristotle insisted instead that man is by nature a political animal, a being whose capacity for speech compels him to live with others...
...With characteristic irony, Westlake says of his crime-noir character Parker and his crime-blanc character Dortmunder: "It probably says something discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and the comic under my own name...
...He expects life to kick him...
...These include his worst-titled, The Spy in the Ointment, and his best-titled, God Save the Mark...
...Nothing is sacred for Westlake...
...That something is usually associates who cross Parker...
...Only slightly less challenging were the obstacles Westlake overcame to bring Dortmunder into being...
...echoing, no doubt intentionally, Xenophon's pronouncement, "It is noble as well as just and pious and more pleasant to remember the good things rather than the bad ones...
...Dortmunder devises a plan that circumvents museum security with ease...
...Since the publication of The Hot Rock, Westlake has written twenty novels without Dortmunder...
...He succeeds by portraying what is both unnatural and potentially amusing about living with a vow of silence while simultaneously showing that the dignity of the truly decent rises above the merely ridiculous...
...For a long time I just couldn't think of the right name, and then one day, I was in a bar—the only time in my life— and one of the neon beer logos on the back said 'DAB—Dortmunder Actien Bier,' and, I said, 'That's what I want, an action hero with something wrong with him,' and John Dortmunder was born...
...Fortunately, upon rediscovering Dortmunder, Westlake summoned his own Dortmunderian resolve, and "John Dortmunder's one and only story was ready to fly...
...Yet at an editor's suggestion, Westlake reconsidered...
...Help I am Being Held Prisoner tells the story of a practical joker who told one joke too many, resulting in a congressman's car acci-dent—which leads to his incarceration in a prison where he stumbles across a coterie of inmates with a tunnel to the outside world...
...The bookstores nowadays stock an endless number of comic mysteries, the best known by Lawrence Block, Carl Hiaasen, and Gregory McDonald...
...Edward Banfield once wrote of an unusual academic candidate interviewed at the University of Chicago: an ex-convict...
...Starring Martin Lawrence as West-lake's ill-starred thief (renamed from John Dortmunder to Kevin Caffrey), the film is the latest of Hollywood's generally failed attempts to present Westlake's crime capers—a series that includes Robert Redford in The Hot Rock (the best of a weak lot), George C. Scott in Bank Shot, Paul Le Mat in Jimmy the Kid, and Christopher Lambert in Why Me...
...A nephew is somebody irresponsible or incompetent for whom one grudgingly feels responsibility...
...Good as these comedies are, West-lake found his best vehicle with the Dortmunder saga...
...After his sixteenth adventure, he went into a quarter-century retirement, only to come back in 1997's Comeback, since followed by Backflash and Flashfire...
...Dort-munder is a man of peace...
...it was the job I was born for...
...Americans are extraordinarily touchy folks, quick to take offense at slights...
...Only by virtue of dedication and native talent has Dortmunder risen to the top of his profession...
...Before he can quite complete the second revolution, however, one of the book's antagonists—an unscrupulous attorney who voluntarily entered an insane asylum to keep the thieves at arm's length—laughs at Dortmunder from behind the safety of an electrified fence...
...Dortmunder works hard to earn what he steals...
...Nor does Parker embody the pure negativity of Iago: "I am not what I am...
...Thus begins Charlie's adventure and Westlake's career as a comic novelist...
...He is a Robin Hood for an age with an ethic of individual responsibility: He robs from the rich and shares with the deserving dishonest...
...And in his idiosyncratic way, Dortmunder is a just man...
...Tiny held the panhandler a little closer to him to give him some parting advice...
...Amusing as these writers often are, it is an injustice to place Westlake in their company...
...You're all the nephews in the world rolled into one, you know that...
...After some extremely funny missteps, Art (and Bart) finds himself (or themselves) married to the Kerner twins...
...Donald West-lake is not only our finest living comic mystery writer, but perhaps one of our finest living philosophers...
...And under a cloud of pseudonyms—at least five, but it's a good bet there are more—he's written dozens more...
...No, no, no, in this issue only," Kelp assured him...
...I mean, why am I in this place...
...Such a way of looking at things is alien to Westlake...
...Unaware of Matt's existence, Fred avoided offending him with ease...
...So they leave him $2,000, his life, and promise of repayment...
...Dortmunder would be a man after Strauss's heart, for it was Strauss who said, "A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity...
...Circumstances don't conspire against him...
...Having met a beautiful girl, Elizabeth Kerner—whose considerable wealth tarnishes her beauty not a whit—Art naturally seeks her good graces via witty repartee and shared experiences...
...Dort-munder's most violent act occurs when, in Don't Ask, he escapes an unjust imprisonment by cold-cocking "an economist from Yale"—an action prompted by necessity, but not needing much excuse...
...He first made his appearance in The Hunter (1962), and for thirteen years kept himself busy...
...It begins with a spectacular armed robbery by Parker and three confederates that yields almost $100,000...
...This pattern—unmerited failure, stoic resignation, and reluctant acquiescence to one last shot—is repeated at a police station and a mental hospital...
...Only one thing holds them back: They don't wish to escape...
...in Bad News, Westlake writes "John looked Andy over, as though considering him as a pet: Keep him, or have him put to sleep...
...And so on...
...Yet despite masterful planning and execution, something always goes wrong...
...So by default the inheritance went to the nephew...
...Under his own name, Westlake has written forty-seven works over the past four decades...
...Of the twenty non-Dortmunder books, eleven are comic crime capers, and they all exhibit Westlake's witti-ness...
...Nephew Charlie's life takes a turn for the worse when two mob enforcers, Trask and Slade, enter his bar and show him a card with his name and an ink blot...
...In West-lake's novels one doesn't, for example, encounter gay characters manly in every respect other than sexual preference...
...And then Parker seeks his revenge...
...He finds something laughable about us all...
...I'll tell you where I got it...
...And when Volpinex (an unscrupulous attorney whose name sounds like a cross between a wolf and an acne medication) discovers Dodge's dodge, Art seems to have no out but to kill him...
...in his stories, by showing us man as the animal who can laugh at himself, use speech to explode human pretensions, and thus reach toward civilization...
...Parker is not a sociopath who takes pleasure in his disdain for the decent...
...Parker considers this a breach of normal criminal ethics...
...That's a very good question," Tiny rumbled, and Kelp said, "To be perfectly honest, John—" "Don't strain yourself...
...I can think of only one living writer who might reconcile the two—and that's Donald E. Westlake, the author of the best crime-caper stories ever written...
...Though nothing has come without struggle, he has with Bad News raised his winning percentage to better than .500: four successes (more or less), three defeats, and four outcomes defying simple classification...
...but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar...
...There's nothing here to steal...
...Instead he is motivated by pride and justice, if only the justice of the proverbial gang of thieves: Justice is necessary for everybody who is not willing to be alone...
...He wrote novels about suppressed rage (361), a young man corrupted by degrees (Killy), and the criminally insane (Pity Him Afterwards...
...You are the biggest nephew that ever lived...
...If he thinks, he can stay in that place, he's crazy...
...I'm not a con artist...
...You'd think by now they would've learned better...
...But this fascination with the darker side of human behavior—a product of the same detachment that allows Westlake to view serious things comically— appears in a number of his works that aren't unqualified successes...
...Nephew" is a term of art for West-lake...
...And finally, Westlake has just produced—under his pseudonym "Richard Stark"—the novel Flashfire, the nineteenth adventure of his master criminal Parker, the anti-Dortmunder and reigning champion in the amorality division of American mystery fiction...
...So, in a panic, he kills her...
...But you can't miss Westlake's skill in the recently published Bad News, the latest chapter in the comic saga of the inimitable John Archibald Dortmunder—master thief and American hero, a man whose bad luck is topped only (and barely) by his resourcefulness and determination...
...This is not a recipe for marital bliss...
...Indeed, properly read, Westlake has already reconciled Plato and Aristotle Steven Lenzner is completing his dissertation in political science at Harvard University...
...His most conventionally ambitious is Kahawa, the story of two mercenaries' attempted theft of a train carrying $6,000,000 of Idi Amin's coffee...
...Yet Dortmunder feels unease about the propriety of collecting money not earned in a manner consistent with his sense of the fitness of things...
...The blue-collar regulars at a bar are boastful, ignorant, and argumentative, with volubility in inverse relation to actual knowledge...
...Most important, Westlake's men and women—despite their remarkable range and variety—always remain men and women...
...The latest volume, Flashfire, is a typical Parker adventure—well crafted, swift moving, and highly entertaining...
...Dortmunder is commissioned by the U.N...
...Parker derives no pleasure from killing...
Vol. 6 • July 2001 • No. 40
