Broken by Don Winslow
/
Broken
by Don Winslow
William Morrow, 2020
Like a home run derby or an all-star game where great talent turns up to flex and pivot, to dazzle the audience with a low-stakes performance, Don Winslow’s new story collection, Broken, is an enjoyable showcase of the author’s myriad talents, but it’s missing something you might have come to expect from his recent work: it’s missing the sense of risk.
His past few novels have been huge, brilliant, complicated things whose development, chapter-by-chapter, give the impression of an author juggling a pair of chainsaws—there’s so much going on and so little room for error—and then suddenly two chainsaws is four chainsaws, and now he’s on a bicycle, he’s rolling it onto a tightrope...
Each page of those novels, in other words, is weighted with the sense that a thousand-plus hours of work went into this one story, and we fly toward the endings of those stories with two rival concerns: (1) we’re worried about the characters, how things will work out, (2) we also want to know if Winslow sticks the landing.
But that’s a novel. A novel’s a bigger creature.
A short story can sometimes have that feeling of something that’s been toiled over. A George Saunders story, for instance, often feels like the author chiseled each sentence from one of his own teeth.
But what we get here with Broken is the portrait of an author having fun.
Two stories in particular, one dedicated to the actor Steve McQueen and another to the crime novelist Elmore Leonard, really do, remarkably, capture the flavor of either personality’s most distinctive work (that latter story, the one dedicated to Leonard, is particularly sweet and refreshing in that it showcases a professional camaraderie more common among genre novelists than the ascotted literati).
And yet the opening story, “Broken”, is both a skilled piece of writing and the worst thing in the book: the story is fast-paced, it’s exciting, and it ends with a brilliantly orchestrated crescendo of violence—but it amounts to nothing more than noise and blood, a watered-down version of Winslow’s epic NYPD novel from 2016, The Force, in which we have a tight circle of rough cops, a powerful drug-slinging villain, and a personal grudge that pulls them together.
It’s a harrowing start to the book, because it raises the question of whether an author of ambitious tomes can forget the subtler craft of a small-scale story.
But I don’t think Winslow has forgotten. The second story, “Crime 101,” is a delightful caper about a diamond thief and the beleaguered cop trying to catch him (this is the one that’s dedicated to Steve McQueen, though it appears to’ve gotten half its chromosomes from Michael Mann’s movie Heat). The story sputters out at the end, but the ride is fun—which could be said about pretty much all of them.
Like for instance there’s a character in one story, a veteran of the war in Iraq, whose traumas are communicated quickly, carefully, and convincingly. When she’s driven to consider suicide near the end of the story, the decision is believable. Then, suddenly, she lowers the gun from her head and decides that she’s lived too long under the shadow of her trauma, and that it’s time to seek help. Why is she seeking help now when she’s renounced it for years? She appears to make this decision with no greater motive than to allow the author an exit.
Winslow appears to be doing a cost-benefit analysis. A reader who devotes six or ten hours to reading a novel deserves a hefty payout at the end, and he shows up to the task of providing that payout. On the other hand: if the author doesn’t land the ending of a story, what has the reader lost? An hour? And besides: a Winslow story with a weak ending is still twice as good as an episode of Law & Order.
As Winslow told the Hollywood Reporter recently, “I’ve written more than twenty books in my career but I hit [success] late in life and now I feel, at 65, like I can’t work fast enough to catch up. I’m waking up every morning at 5 am and starting to write…I will be following [Broken] next year, 2021, with a big new book which may serve as the start of a new trilogy.”
So he’s a workhorse, but he isn’t just churning out books for the sake of the check. There’s definitely an urgency, in Broken, of somebody frothing with stories to tell; these are, in fact, novellas, if you wanna get technical, and every single one feels like it could have been a novel but for the fact that its author’s appreciative of the fact that you and he both only have so much time on this earth—he knows the difference between a story that’s worth an hour of your time and a story that’s worth ten.
Also, as a tangential note about Broken, submitted without condescension: the book is adult in subject matter, and mostly masterful in its execution, but what came to mind at the book’s halfway point is that this is ideal reading for a book-weary teen. I have several adult male friends who don’t read for pleasure. Even now, in their twenties and thirties, books remind them only of the drudgery of high school curricula, of being told to ignore their erection and focus on Hawthorne. I have a feeling, however, that those friends might have enjoyed a lifetime of reading if somebody had put a book like Broken in their hands when they were sixteen. An exciting book that might have led them to Elmore Leonard, and Steve McQueen, and the 1970s crime cinema by which Winslow’s work is so influenced…
Among the best qualities of Winslow’s novels is the looking glass he gives us into the logistics of the underworld. Little remarks that make us feel privy to something illicit, and separate from our daily lives. It’s the transporting joy of great fiction.
In Broken, for instance, we get this, when it comes to robbing a jeweler from the back of his store: “[I]t’s an article of faith among jewelry couriers and salesmen that theft rings put storefronts under observation.”
Later, on the topic of resolving cases: “Someone talks. You can do all the CSI razzmatazz you want—that voodoo is for juries—but most crimes are solved because someone yaps.”
Then there are the grizzled nuggets of wisdom.
“Her mother was a gambler, taught her since she was a little girl that you don’t chase bad money with good. You never catch it, you never get it back.”
And chest-thumping insights like, “You take a step backward from someone, they push you two steps more. Because you let them think they can.”
It’s a testament to a writer’s talent when the most scathing thing you can say about his latest release is that it isn’t as good as his last one. As Michael Silverblatt recently said about Ben Hecht, the prolific newspaper man and novelist and screenwriter of the 1930s, Don Winslow is a relic from a time “when writers wrote.”
If somebody proves to be great company, as Winslow certainly has over the years, you take that company as readily for a three-course meal as you do for a beer.
Broken goes down more like a beer. A good one.
—Alex Sorondo is a writer and film critic living in Miami and the host of the Thousand Movie Project. His fiction has been published in First Inkling Magazine and Jai-Alai Magazine.