Sorry to have been away so long (more than a month)! I ran through the backlog of things I knew I wanted to talk about before I began this blog, and books interesting enough to blog about don’t come around every day. Also, all that writing was taking up my reading time, giving me fewer possible topics to chat about.
While I was away, I read a few books I didn’t like very much. I was inspired to read Victor Hugo’s novel about the French Revolution, Ninety-Three, after enjoying Lever’s biography of the marquis de Sade a few months ago. It was disappointing. I just didn’t like anything about it (although it validated my suspicion that the “oubliette” encountered in the movie Labyrinth is a real thing).
Meanwhile, I hadn’t had any luck finding one of the books on my to-read list, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, at the bookstore, so I bought it on AbeBooks.com (my favorite online marketplace for books). As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, after I buy a book I normally stash it on the bookshelf for some time, while I work through the ever-growing pile of books I’ve been meaning to read. Not the case with this book. I flipped to the first page after I opened the package, and I was off and running.
You might also remember that a little while ago I read the novel The Revenant shortly before watching the film (here’s the post). In an effort to reverse the process, I watched the movie Carol (which was also up for several Oscars) shortly before reading the book it was based on. I liked both the book and the movie, so I’ll write about them here.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
I think I first heard about this book in an interview with Quentin Tarantino. He cited it as a primary influence on his work, and it is very clearly an influence on his movie Jackie Brown. Apparently this novel is one of the classics of the American crime genre; I don’t read a lot of crime fiction, so other than the Tarantino reference, I hadn’t heard much about it.
I mentioned that I started it the day it came in the mail, which I hardly ever do. I finished it the next day. It sizzles, man, moves like a bullet.
It’s hard to say much about the story without giving anything away. The book is about a wise guy (Coyle), who is free on the street but facing sentencing on a prior in a few weeks. He’s procuring guns for other criminals while contemplating selling out one of his pals in order to get a reduced sentence. He just doesn’t know who he can give up without also being implicated (or who’s important enough to the cops to convince them to sweeten the deal). His “friends,” meanwhile, are all-too-aware of Coyle’s situation, and no one is eager to be his fall guy.
The commentary I have seen about Eddie Coyle focuses on the dialogue Higgins writes. It really is exceptional. Higgins adroitly uses contractions and word placement to replicate the way people actually talk better than anybody. He is given to writing monologues, which isn’t “realistic” per se, but most of the novel’s story is told through its characters’ mouths. (As a side note, I also noticed a few pet phrases of Stephen King’s – things I thought sounded awesome when I was, like, 11, but now realize no one could pull off in real life, such as “F*** you and the horse you rode in on.”)
There are a few enigmatic statements sown throughout the book, things that maybe hold a deeper meaning than it first appears. One of the characters shooting the breeze with Coyle says, “It’s a great life. If you don’t weaken, it’s a great life.” I don’t know why that has stuck with me, but I’ve been turning it over in my head for a few days, and I’m still not quite sure what he means (you’ll have to read the book to get the context). There’s some decent philosophizing at the end, wrapping things up nicely.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle was former Assistant U.S. Attorney George Higgins’s first novel, but he went on to write another 30 or 40 books in the crime genre. I’m looking forward to reading more (although I see only one of his other books – Cogan’s Trade – is popular/famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page).
Carol, directed by Todd Haynes / The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
The film Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, is a faithful adaptation of the novel it is based upon, The Price of Salt. Carol – nominated in six categories – was shut out at the Oscars, but Best Supporting Actress nominee Rooney Mara is charming in the film, and Best Actress nominee Cate Blanchett is great, as usual.
The Price of Salt is a lesbian romance first published in 1952 (!). A chance encounter between shopgirl Therese and Carol, a member of New York’s upper-class, sparks an intense relationship that has life-changing ramifications for both of them.
Set in the 1950s, the novel shows us the suffocating nature of life for American women of that era. Their lives were mainly scripted by the desires of the men they were attached to. From the outside, Therese (pronounced terez) seems to be at the beginning of a good, full life: she has a boyfriend who cares for her, an upcoming trip to Europe, a group of friends in the city. But she is unhappy, because she didn’t choose any of it – everything has been thrust upon her by one man or another.
She takes a temporary job in a department store during the holidays, and that is where she meets Carol, a socialite come to buy a Christmas gift for her daughter. Right away there’s a spark between them, despite the banality of their contact. Therese impulsively sends Carol a Christmas card, and their relationship begins.
Therese is a bit of a mystery in the film, at least in the beginning. It doesn’t do a great job of explaining the immediate attraction between the two women. Many of their exchanges rely on body language and eye contact; Therese in particular is not a voluminous gal. But I actually enjoyed that – real people don’t explicitly state what they’re feeling all the time. The book fills in more of the blanks…and it turns out the thoughts and emotions I mentally supplied while watching the film were not always the ones Highsmith had in mind. But that was kind of fun: Carol Mad Libs!
There’s one sex scene in the film, which is the rarest of all things: a sex scene that is actually necessary. Black Swan comes to mind as a movie that would have been essentially the same without the sex (not that I’m complaining). Here it is central to the plot, in more ways than one.
The meaning of the words “the price of salt” eluded me until late in the novel. They refer to the price the characters pay to live more than a conformist, fake-plastic-tree life. The things that are forbidden, but which make them happy, are the things with real flavor: salt.
Overall, the novel is a bit uneven. Some parts are brilliant, some are boring or baffling; it’s pretty up-and-down. Like the film, the first third of the book is slow. But it does eventually get going, and it’s actually a pretty great story. I also loved the ending, which I almost never say about any book. I liked it enough that I grabbed a copy of Strangers on a Train by Highsmith (the basis for my favorite Hitchcock film).
Summing up my silly boovie (or mook, if you prefer) experiment: I read The Revenant and then watched the movie. I watched Carol and then read The Price of Salt. The idea was to determine if I would always just like the book better, or if I would end up liking whichever format I experienced first.
The novel The Revenant is very different from the film; I enjoyed the book but not the movie. Carol, however, is very faithful to The Price of Salt. I think I liked the book and the film equally. They both have their issues (somewhat different issues from each other), but are ultimately pretty good.
It’s tempting to say that the version I experience first ends up being my favorite, provided I enjoyed it. On the other hand, I’ve been trying to think of a movie I liked significantly better than the book it was based on, and the only one that comes to mind is About a Boy (book by Nick Hornby), and I really liked that movie for a while (but I’d watched it several times before I read the book). Obviously, this experiment had flawed parameters from the start.
But hey, I got a couple of blog posts out of the idea, and I read a pair of decent books and went to the movies twice, so: totally worth it. I’m not sorry or surprised that I don’t have a more definitive conclusion.
I’ve slowed down, but I haven’t given up on this blogging endeavor. I still find a lot of value in it, even if I haven’t become famous enough yet to get an invitation to work for The Ringer. But I am rolling back my own expectations of myself – blogging once a week is a lot, at least if I stick with the long format. So you’ll probably hear from me more like once or twice a month in the future. It will depend a lot on how interesting I find the things I’m reading. Thanks for hanging around. Salut!
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. ISBN 9780312429690
- The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. ISBN 980486800295
- Here’s the link to the cigarette photo.
Volumes of Forgotten Lore 
I liked the film Bridge of Spies more than the book. I did see the movie first, but I’m not convinced that’s the whole reason. The book took an interesting story of interweaving pieces and dulled it down with flat writing and too much detail. I found the movie much more cohesive and engaging. But other than BoS, yeah, I prefer the book 99% of the time, too.
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