Murder And Mayhem In P-Town-Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t
Dance
Flip to back Flip to front
Book Review
By Sam Lowell
Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Norman Mailer, 1984
The novelist/journalist/philosopher king Norman Mailer wrote
many types of books, and covered a wide variety of themes. Types from pockets
full of essays, non-fictional fiction, fictional non-fiction, advertisements
for himself and flat out old-time journalistic commentary on iconic figures.
His themes ranged from war to white hipsters to levitating the Pentagon to
Marilyn to the moon landings and everything in between. Along the way he wrote
a few, well, let’s call them whodunits since murder mysteries is not quite what
he was into, wrote the book under review, Tough
Guys Don’t Dance, under that imperative.
The whole story-line here takes place in Provincetown, a
town that the many times I have visited there in the past did not seem like the
natural scene for murder and mayhem but maybe I didn’t look close enough. The
protagonist here, Tim, Tim Madden, a guy who has all the symptoms of an Irish
guy coming up the hard way, a guy who just because of who he was had to find out
at some point in his life, hopefully early on, that tough guys don’t dance, and
thems the rule, although he just happens to only be half-Irish. That has never
stopped anybody from acting wholly Irish, it’s in the dominant genes, and
moreover Tim is a writer to boot (although all through the book he may be
thinking about writing, maybe even writing like a fiend like Mailer himself,
but we never read that he had put pen to paper of late).
Hey, guess what during the period that this book was written
back in the 1980s Norman Mailer, a writer, just happened to live in
Provincetown so he took advantage of local knowledge to flesh out his scenario,
a scenario that factors in some very strange doings (those things that I said I
might not have looked at closely enough on prior visits) out at land’s end, out
in that hook of land that the old time Pilgrims first spied in confronting the
new land back in the day.
Here’s the skinny and see what you think about our amateur
unconscious detective, one Tim Mailer, oops, Madden. Tim was on a drinking/feeling
sorry for himself binge after his snarly wife left him for parts unknown. This
wife, Patty, whom he had “stolen” away from a guy he went to prep school,
Wardley, with after she had latched onto him and his dough, Patty was that kind
of woman, a hustling upstart cheerleader so yeah guys would part with their dough
or whatever else she wanted for some grasping sex, one of those impossible
Wasps with the three names and three roman numerals after their names. During
his binge Tim ran into a couple of out-of-towners, Lonnie and Jessica, a little
unusual in the off-season the time frame for the action in the book. To make a
long story short during the binge he wound up drinking with them far into the
night and the next morning woke up to a couple of new realities. The couple
were both dead, the man by an apparent suicide and the woman as he would find
out to his horror when he went to check out his marijuana patch in Truro beheaded
by hands unknown (he also woke up to a car, Patty’s car, Patty’s everything,
since he had no serious dough and she had gotten a very good settlement from
old Wasp, whose front seat was splattered with blood and the proud possessor of
a tattoo in the days before that personal statement symbol was “cool.” The
problem with all of these scary facts is that he was not sure in his stupor
that he had not done the killings. That hard fact is what the rest of the story
hinges on.
Now naturally no protagonist, drunk or sober, in a whodunit
is going to be the fall guy, no way, because in this case Tim’s father, a
reprobate full Irishman, didn’t raise any guy who was going to take the fall
for stuff he didn’t do. So Tim had to get his best sleuthing brain working to
get out of the hole that he, not only as a writer, but an ex-con (dealing coke) has
dug for himself, or somebody has dug for
him. Along the way as happens way too often in murder stories the bodies start
piling up. All because of a busted real estate deal, hubris, thwarted love, including
the “love that dare not speak its name,” the way they alluded to it in the old
days today same-sex, or my favorite-the ghost of old fishing village P-town has
come up to seek revenge on the modern day residents.
As for those bodies piling up you already know that Lonnie
and Jessica have passed on (remember her in two parts one part her severed head
found by Tim where he hid his stash the other part unknown then); wifey Patty
who had left for parts unknown actually was hanging around but she too was
wasted, beheaded by hands unknown and (and
shared a temporary resting place with Jessica where Tim hid his stash, at least
her pretty little head did); a couple of townies who help Patty’s Wasp ex-husband
and had to be gotten rid of because they knew too much or were loose cannons;
that impossible three name three numeral Wasp who was Patty’s ex-husband: and,
in the end a rancid rogue cop, or posing as a local cop (a DEA agent really)
who was the lynchpin to the whole scenario. He was wasted by his wife, called Laurel
although her name was Madeleine, and Tim’s ex-Mafia queen girlfriend. That’s
six, count ‘em and Tim and the queen walk away free as birds. Hell, there are
too many moving parts here for one small seacoast town in off-season. Don’t you
think?
Of course, as with virtually any Mailer novel everybody and
their brother or sister is having sex, hetero-, gay or bisexual, a whole identity
politics crisis in the making, having all kinds of sex, missionary, oral or
anal, you know that “love that dare not speak its name” business (and maybe
some other stuff from the Kama Sutra who knows), so no wonder the conclusion I
drew from this one was not some old wives’ tale about the spirits which haunt
P-town seeking revenge for old time slights but hubris, pure human hubris.
Still, unlike some other later, longer Mailer efforts, this one was a
page-turner. Yeah, tough guys really don’t dance, just ask Tim Madden and his
dad they’ll set you straight.
No comments:
Post a Comment