City on Fire by Don Winslow

City on Fire
by Don Winslow
HarperCollins Publishers

After three big novels about America’s eternal war on drugs (Power of the Dog, The Cartel, The Border), and a bestseller about NYPD cops during an opioid epidemic (The Force), Don Winslow wipes the headline ink off his fingers and sets the new novel, City on Fire, in a 1980s gang war between the Irish and Italian mobs.

He made this one up.

But it doesn’t feel any less vivid or engrossing for the inventiveness. And while City on Fire isn’t the product of Edward Gibbon-style research, whether into cartel power structures or police work or drug trafficking or forensics, Winslow still communicates something authentic just by the way he talks. Writes. The characteristically clipped, swift, wise-guy voice in the prose:

…Frankie Vecchio hears it [an offensive joke from Brendan]. Frankie’s a soldier in the Moretti crew; he’s sitting at the next table with a couple of his guys, hears it and looks over. “You’ll keep our fucking mouth shut if you know what’s good for you.”

Yeah, well, Brendan Handrigan never knew what was good for him–if he had, he might have graduated high school, or gone into the Navy or something. Now he makes some lame response about it begin a free country, but finishes his drink and leaves the bar….It was a stupid joke, the kind guys make to each other a dozen times a day. Back in the good times…they’d laugh about it. But that was before, and now feelings are raw, and Liam has stolen Paulie’s woman, and it’s not funny.

The setting is Rhode Island, from 1986 to roughly the end of ‘87 (with high-speed flashbacks to the ‘60s and ‘70s), and our hero is a young Irish dock worker, Danny Ryan, with a young Irish wife, Terri, whose brother is Danny’s best friend and whose father is the head of the Dogtown Irish (they don’t seem to use the word “mob” or “gang” but they’re presented essentially as the red-haired mafia counterpart). In fact, whatever name they use, it seems everyone's in the mob to some degree or other. Except there's no glamor to it. Nobody's rich, violence seems like a thing of the past, and the hard-wrought gangland peace they presently enjoy, forged years ago by their Irish and Italian forebears, is less celebrated, among this younger generation, than simply…acknowledged. The eggshells they constantly tread. Stifling a comment, eating an insult, sacrificing some source of illicit income because (say it with me) we gaahtaa keeeeep the peeeaaace.

But since peace is all these young kids have ever known, they take it for granted, and see only its limitations. Thus when Liam, Danny’s deadbeat baby brother-in-law, assaults the girlfriend of an Italian up-and-comer, everything falls into bloodshed and chaos.

The story takes place in Rhode Island but seems to be set, more specifically, in Rhode Island winter. A different timespace from Rhode Island proper. Some of Fire’s most pivotal scenes of gangland conflict take place in an icy-foggy grayness whose threadbare descriptions come off as dreamlike, ethereal. A dark starless place. Characters waddle across the stage in jacket upon sweater upon same, even the narrator cursing the cold, while citizens keep off the streets (and out of the story!) so that the whole city feels populated by combatants exclusively. It’s got, in that respect, a vaguely western feel to it. Not in the language, or anything about the setting, but in the sense of cramped quarters, with few places to hide, and a town too small for the both of ‘em.

Which is partly, we can guess, half-intentional on Winslow’s part, as he contends that the modern crime novel is descended directly from the westerns of yore. One generation handing its tropes to the next. The outfits change, and little else.

It seems from YouTube and Twitter commentary that “generational trauma” is a hot topic in recent media (Pixar’s Encanto and Turning Red have been fed to the think-piecers already) and it’s an apt lens, here, for studying Winslow’s tale of hotheaded young men destroying everyone’s life. Our anti-heroes are, primarily, the twenty- and thirtysomething offspring of gangsters. As kids, they grew up in harmony, but now, as adults, everyone’s mindful of a shadow looming over them; some person they need to emulate or defy, some role they need to fulfill; and so they go out with guns in pursuit of Godfather-Goodfella romantics. They’re trying, it seems, to emulate what they imagine to be the stuff of their fathers’ generation (nobody cares that it’s those exact battle-weary fathers begging them to stop answering insults with bullets).

One of the things Winslow’s handled so brilliantly in his career is the portraiture of men who mask their fragility with violence. Violence as a kind of shout against their helplessness to some great tyrannical system. What these young gangsters’ antics suggest, in City on Fire, is that maybe the reason one generation repeats the traumatic mistakes of its forebears is because, in their shame at having been so coldhearted and dumb, the old men presented their foibles and crimes as high romance. The grandparent who, when asked why they got married at 21 to somebody they barely knew and now actively despise, says simply, “It’s what’s done.” Easier than saying, Because I bent to the pressure. I didn’t think for myself.

They take a story and twist it around so it’s more palatable. Which is exactly what our author’s doing: City on Fire uses the Trojan War as its template, with modern facsimiles of its most iconic images (e.g. a suspiciously opaque money van in place of a big wooden horse), but a reader knowing little or nothing about the history or mythology of ancient Greece (like me) won’t be lost; nor will an expert in those stories find the text too chummy, full of nudges and winks. What Winslow’s taken from the Trojan story is a narrative structure. A series of beats. A recovering alcoholic named Cassie who predicts things.

And the book is magnificent. It’s the fastest-moving of Winslow’s past few tomes and, at 350 pages, about forty percent shorter than each. The voice is vividly personable, but never chatty. It’s a stew of contradictions: hilarious and violent, moody and buoyant, brooding and playful. A huge sprawling thing of what seems like almost ruinously big ambition–condensed into a neat, easy, self-contained volume (the first of a trilogy).

Whatever qualms a reader might have with Winslow’s subject matter–which has softened, somewhat, from the near-surrealist depictions of gangland torture in Cartel and Border (all of which is based on fact) — it’s hard to deny that City on Fire is a monument of masterful storytelling. Nor is it fair to say that its greatness is mentionable only in relation to its genre. Skimming something like The New York Review of Books for pieces about Joyce Carol Oates, you’ll find remarks to the effect of, “Ms. Oates is publishing two novels this year, as well as a thriller.”

Whatever the label of what he’s writing means, Winslow embraces it. Says in interviews that yeah, he lives in a literary ghetto, “and I love my neighbors.”

But there’s nothing impoverished about his recent work. Winslow’s novels make for an experience that feel almost frustratingly trite, discussing it with friends, because even if you’re an avid reader (as a good chunk of Winslow’s fans likely are not; I’d wager he appeals, in huge numbers, to the time-pressed book-buyers, who gets through one or three titles a year, favoring a very select handful of authors who never let them down) the special delight of Winslow’s better books, discussed with friends at a bar, becomes a celebration of how they manage to be both “entertaining and educational!”

Go figure. That ever a book should pull it off.

A better way of saying it is that Winslow’s as interested in his characters as in the social, professional, societal systems they inhabit. Corrections officers and their prisons, cops and their departments, narcos and their cartels, mobsters and their, uh, cosas. In revealing how his characters work, he shows us how they are products of that system, and we close the book with a more nuanced sense of “how things work.” Recidivism, addiction, a police department’s collusion with local government to massage crime stats. That he should be able to convey these things without ever losing narrative momentum is a small miracle.

The closest Winslow comes to dropping the ball with City on Fire is the first thirty pages, when he introduces something like a dozen characters in one scene. Pat and Paulie and Peter and Chris and Danny and Jimmy and Sheila and Liam and Cassie and Marty and Ned.

There’s others, though, and it’s easy to imagine a reader rolling her eyes in that first chapter, “No chance I’ll keep track of all these people,” but fortunately the fear is unfounded. By page fifty there’s almost no confusion at all–and, if there still is, people start dying almost immediately thereafter, and the cast gets manageable indeed. Even after Sal and Tony and Madeleine show up. And the lingerie mogul. Some cops and a baby. Then a whole different gang, at the halfway point.

Is it the best or most inventive of his novels? No. He’s been at it for thirty years and, as we know, career novelists invariably have more novels than stories residing in their fingertips. Complemented on his musical “chops,” Leonard Cohen used to quarrel with the S: “I have one chop.” Said it with pride, knowing he used it well.

But Winslow’s premise in City on Fire, modeling its narrative on the Trojan War, is itself a confession. Quite literally, You’ve heard this story before. What’s magical is that we may’ve never heard it told so well.

-Alexander Sorondo is an author and podcaster in Miami.