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Read this novel and reflect on your own life choices
Book Review
By Derryll White
Leonard, Elmore (1998). Out of Sight.
“Was worse than you imagined wasn’t it? Baby, you with the bad boys now.”
– Moselle
Elmore Leonard is the funniest crime novelist you will ever read, even funnier than Carl Hiaasen – now that is saying something.
He is a master of subtlety, hinting at the joke and letting the reader put it together a page or two later. Black comedy some say – well, he does get away with laughing at a black FBI agent, but then again that was in the last century. Never mind, Leonard is timeless. A bank robber, around 200 banks, standing and holding a credit application brochure “Looking for money! You’ve come to the right place.” Come on folks – that’s funny!
What is a life but choices – good ones, bad ones. Jack Foley made some of his very early on, deciding to be a bank robber rather than take on the life of a normal working man. Some two hundred robberies later he was forced to make another choice, be decent or not. At that point all of Jack’s previous choices became mute.
Karen Sisco made choices as well, becoming a federal deputy sheriff. Elmore Leonard puts Sisco on a very funny collision course with jack Foley, letting her become Jack’s zoo-zoo (a prison term for candy). She also becomes his redeemer and locks him up for another 30 years.
Leonard’s writing is crisp and clean, definitely a black comedy that looks at the twists and turns any life can take. The story is fast-paced, thought-provoking and very entertaining. The dialogue pulls the reader in and Jack and Karen become the yin and yang of one’s personal reality. Read this novel and reflect on your own life choices.
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Excerpts from the novel:
LIFE OF CRIME – “I started out driving for my uncle Cully when I was eighteen, right out of high school. Cully and a guy used to work with him, they went in a bank in Slidell, over by the Mississippi line? The guy with Cully jumps the counter to get to the tellers and breaks his leg. All three of us went up. I did twenty-two months and learned how to fight for my life. Cully did twenty-seven years before he came out and died not too long after in Charity Hospital, I think trying to make up for all the good times he’d missed.”
DETROIT – Buddy squinting, trying to see through the snow coming down. He said, “Where’s the plant? It used to come all the way out to the street, with a bridge across to the offices, the administration building; it’s gone. There’s something way over there, Jefferson North. You see the sign? Yeah, way over there, some stacks. It must be the new one. I mean this was a big fucking plant, took up blocks around here, six thousand hourly, and it’s gone.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
