This is a book that I had read back in April, lucky
enough was I to receive an advance reader’s edition. I liked the book so much
that upon its official publication, last week, I decided to re-read it, too
jealous was I of those who would be experiencing it for the first time.
I wrote ‘experiencing’
because reading The Cut felt like, to me, being driven around in
town by someone who knows every place and every one; we're cruisin' without
hurry or worry. There’s music playing of course, maybe a Morricone
soundtrack or maybe just the soundtrack of the city and its citizens. The temperature,
although a bit warm and humid, gets freshened up by a soft cool wind as we
drive into the night. And the air is thick with possibilities, both good and
bad. But we’re ready. We ain’t in a hurry. Something will definitely unravel.
And it does.
The Cut makes a realistic observation on what is going on in the
lives of American veterans. Pelecanos puts some focus on the limited choices
and opportunities that many of them have to face in their after-military years,
and about what they will decide to do or not do.
One of them, Spero Lucas,
is 29 years old, fresh out of the Marine Corps. He fought in Iraq for 10 years
after September 11, 2001. “A sobering
decade. A decade that stole his youth.” While Spero was still in Iraq, his
father died. His loss is made greater by the fact he didn’t get to say goodbye
to his dada, so he visits the grave
regularly, leaving a dozen roses every time. Fortunately, Spero has a great
relationship with his brother Leo, who teaches in a high school, and with his
mother, who still copes with the loss of her husband. The love of a family
helps Spero adapt to his new life. Something not every veteran can rely on. For
some, it gets worse if there’s no job either. When overseas, they were used to
taking orders and knew what they were supposed to do. Here, there’s often
nothing to do. “Lucas and Marquis had
been lucky to find something. Most did, eventually. The ones who couldn’t were
in for some long hurt.”
That’s only the ones who come
back without any major physical injury.
The job Spero Lucas had
been lucky to find was investigating for a D.A., in Washington. Or as he
explains to Constance, his girlfriend, he finds things for people, he retrieves their lost
or stolen items. Sometimes money. And now, Spero is hired by Anwan Hawkins, a
drug dealer serving time in the D.C. Jail. Hawkins wants Spero to find packages
that were stolen from his street employees, or to retrieve the money if the
drug has already been sold.
The Cut has more maturity and less rage than earlier Pelecanos stories (the
Stefanos books for example) and at times there’s even a zen-like quality to it.
The Cut is a story about unselfish sacrifices, about trust, about family
and about friendship. As in most Pelecanos novels, it is also about choices,
about life in general, and about how choices influence that life. In an interview he
gave to journalist/writer Craig McDonald, Daniel Woodrell said that he saw his
books as "slices of life stories". This is exactly what Pelecanos
does: he gets you right in the middle of people's lives, at a point where they
have a full baggage of experiences behind them and more in front.
The Cut doesn’t stay away from social issues (it’s a Pelecanos book,
what were you expecting) and the author certainly doesn’t put rose glasses on.
Here, Pelecanos doesn’t need to make a social commentary; his description of the
inside of the school where Leo teaches says it all: “Millions of feet had travelled heavily over these steps since the
building had opened almost a century ago, rendering the stone concave. Leo’s
classroom windows were covered in iron, heavy-mesh screens, allowing fractured,
dim sunlight to enter. The room’s sole computer, donated years earlier, was
ancient; its printer did not print. Pencils were hard to come by. Some of the
desks and blackboards looked more than fifty years old. Leo didn’t think too
hard on the lack of supplies, the missing ceiling tiles, the bathrooms with no
doors on their stalls, the stopped-up toilets, the grim, barely-lit halls…”
Pelecanos knows that this
represents the situation in (too) many schools and that not many readers will
be surprised by his description. But schools are often the only hope of a
better future for these kids. So what message are we sending if that’s how we
prepare those who are supposed to build that future?
There’s also the matter of the
state of the prison system: Hawkins explains one aspect of it to Spero “When I was a kid, the majority of people in
lockup was in for violent crime. Now most of the people in prison are in for
non-violent drug offenses.” And there’s also the issue of how the media
deals with the coverage of criminality today “A notable decrease in violent crime in the District made the murder of
young black men and women more newsworthy than it had been in the past,
meriting front-page placement.” Although it doesn’t seem the same for
everyone “The Post continued to routinely bury the violent
deaths of D.C.’s young black citizens inside the paper, telling its readership
implicitly that black life was worth less than that of whites, and that policy,
apparently, was never going to change.”
George Pelecanos writes
like a friend who sees what's wrong with us and knows he needs to point it out,
even though he's aware that it can (and probably will) hurt us, but he does it
in our best interest, knowing we’ll probably thank him later for it. We accept
this because he also possesses the gift of uncovering beauty in the darkest of
places: after showing us the flaws of our society, a few paragraphs or pages later
he highlights the brighter sides, either in describing a neighborhood, in
underlining simple life pleasures like having a drink, talking about this and
that, or making love. Pelecanos’s strong but simple dialogues reveal more human
emotions than many writers can convey in entire books of trying to analyze their
characters.
The Cut is not a book for readers who need the adrenaline rush of a
thriller-ride, page-turner, heart-attack giver or hair-raising story of a crazy
serial killer/kidnapper/or whatever. This is a book that you read while sipping
a good red wine, sitting comfortably in your favorite chair under a soft
lighting and the sounds of the city around you, or while drinking a cold
beer on the porch with a background of crickets cricketing and dogs barking at
kids laughing and running. You read and you don't worry about tomorrow. But you
do worry about Spero, Leo, Constance, Ernest and others too; you don't get a
heart attack brought on by too much adrenaline, but you can get heart-broken
just the same; we all know this can be almost as painful, if not more.
The title of the book, with
its different meanings, fits perfectly: it is Spero’s 40% cut when he retrieves
lost items; it is the complicated and painful cut between combat life and life
back at home for veterans; it is the non-physical cut suffered through pains
like mourning a loved one, being heart-broken from a love lost or from being
abandoned by a parent, and it is the cut that needs to be made in dilemmas, by
taking a difficult decision when choices will inevitably impact on your life. It
can also be the writer’s cuts that produce these “slices of lives” that Woodrell mentioned.
The Cut is all of this, and more.
Here’s a
work of love, vintage Pelecanos, by the author who shows us the reality of
every day America from a D.C. perspective. While revisiting some familiar
themes, Pelecanos doesn’t repeat himself and he expertly keeps stretching the
boundaries of the crime genre. Don’t be fooled by the tag of crime writing
because this is simply a great novel.
