Prison Reviews: The Cut by George Pelecanos

Fictional Showers/Real Crime 

I honestly began this book with an open and hopeful mind. I figured a book by a writer involved with a TV show as highly touted as The Wire, and most recently the New Orleans HBO drama, Treme, had a lot of potential.

I have never seen The Wire.  The show was syndicated a couple of years back on BET and I planned to watch it, but it was soon cancelled, probably in favor of some reality mess.  There are only two other shows in recent years which have been as acclaimed as The Wire: The Sopranos and Mad Men, both of which I have seen and are rightly acclaimed as the pinnacle of what television can do.  If Matthew Weiner, the creator and occasional writer of those two shows wrote a novel, I would read it enthusiastically.  I would expect something dark and tragic, funny and brilliant.

I expected the same sort of high-quality writing and story from The Cut, but I knew I was in trouble when I saw that this was the 17th book Pelecanos had written. By his full-page (!) back cover photograph he doesn’t look to be much over fifty.  How could such a relatively young man have written so much?  Wasn’t he a cop or something in Baltimore first?  So, say he was a cop for even ten years—from the age of 25 to 35, and he has been working on The Wire for the past ten years—how could he do all of that?  The answer, if The Cut is any indicator, is: horribly.

In the past when I came across a poorly written book, where the characters are not characters drawn with any depth, I’ll leave it on a shelf somewhere in A-Ward where I am housed with 120 others, and it’ll be gone in a matter of minutes.  The last two bad books like this were Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a pretentious crap-fest with a child narrator who lost his father on 9/11, and The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris.  I had loved Ferris’ first book, Then We Came to the End, but The Unnamed was unreadable and I didn’t make it past the halfway point.  In both cases I felt guilty for wasting so much time, and I’m in prison where I have nothing but time.  As a matter of fact, that’s my job—doing time—and still, life is too short to spend  it with a bad book, or any other bad art.

As for The Cut: Lucas Spero is an Iraqi war veteran of Greek ancestry whose only visible flaw is that women find him irresistible.  He is a frequent excerciser and showerer (I have never seen a character take so many showers), an All-American boy who is apparently untroubled by the large amount of death he has brought to the opposing Iraqi army.  He also sleeps soundly after killing a man in D.C. with a wrestling move he learned in high school.  He showered afterwards, so maybe that helped.

Lucas doesn’t seem to think about much, but we are supposed to believe he is always reading both a fiction and a non-fiction book.  He is also familiar with the film oevre of Sergio Leone.  He  spends a lot of time at the cemetery thoughtfully putting flowers on the grave of his dead father (brain cancer!); he visits his mother often, attends Greek Orthodox church every Sunday where he was, of course, an altar boy.  But he never considers the morality of murder, that is, he doesn’t put flowers on his father’s grave and think, “Oh, I’ve probably killed someone’s father before.”

The titular  “cut” is the amount of money Lucas is supposed to receive from the jailed drug dealer (who only deals in marijuana, which makes working for him palatable) when he recovers the bales of weed stolen from FedEx packages on unsuspecting homeowner’s doorsteps.  One is a Stanford and Yale graduate/lawyer who Lucas has in bed within half an hour.  We all know how loose those Ivy-Leaguers are.

The story goes on, unfortunately.  Here are some representative sentences—I took the pain so you don’t have to: “The alcohol had given him a kiss”; “Her mouth was made for it”; “He came out of the shower and dried off with a large bath towel”—as opposed to, I imagine, the sheet of sandpaper he normally towels off with—and finally, “Lucas heard himself laugh.”  This sentence, as bad as it is (no one really hears himself laugh, unless they're viewing themselves outside their body) actually gave me hope.  I thought: okay, maybe the twenty showers up until now are a subconscious tic emblematic of some murderous PTSD, and Lucas is actually psychotic.  This might get good.

But I abandoned all hope when I came to this doozy:  “The sound was sonic.”  Yes, sound is sonic, that’s why it’s sound and not, say, light.  But the book was soon over and all that was left was the emptiness I felt at having read it.

I probably won’t do something like that again.  Normally I would have stopped, but, in keeping with the spirit of revolution that seems to be growing in the U.S., and the world, I’ve simply had enough of these horribly written books that are put on the marketplace only to make money, while countless good, thoughtful, risk-taking authors can’t get a book deal to save their lives.  How much was/is Pelecanos paid for this?  I would guess at least 6, maybe 7 figures.  That’s a crime.  In fact, this might explain the showering:  Pelecanos is guilty as hell, and like all of them, he knows it.  The showering isn’t the character’s tic, it’s the author’s, and no amount of fictional showering is going to cleanse him.

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BULL's book reviewer Curtis Dawkins graduated from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and earned an M.F.A. from Western Michigan University. He is currently an inmate at the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, Michigan.