19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dead Souls, March 18, 2003
This review is from: Cutter and Bone (Midnight Classics) (Paperback)
One of the best depictions of mid-'70s America I've come across, this powerful novel was written when the country was struggling to recover from the Vietnam War and remains as a vivid reminder of that time. Set mostly in Santa Barbara, the story follows two men firmly stuck in cycles of self-destruction. Bone dropped out of the corporate life and left his wife and kids in Minnesota to float around California as a gigolo, while Cutter came back from Vietnam minus an arm and a leg and teeters on the brink of insanity. Both are utterly disillusioned with the world around them and spend a great deal of time drinking and trying to blot out their rapidly suburbanizing, strip-mallifying, consumerist surroundings. The third member of this circle of dead souls is the sarcastic, Quaalude popping Mo, Cutter's live-in girlfriend and mother to his baby.
The whole book reads like one big hangover-the party (late '60s free love, rebellion, Vietnam, etc.) is over, and someone's gotta pay. One evening Bone unknowingly witnesses a murderer disposing of a victim, and what he half saw leads to a half-baked scheme to make some money. In another writer's hands, this could have lead to a comic caper, but Thornburg is intent on showing the county's loss of innocence through the bitter, maimed, and reckless Cutter, and his guilt-ridden and aimless buddy Bone. One problem I had with the story was the friendship between the two men. The book unfolds from Bone's perspective, and it's hard to fathom why he keeps returning to Cutter's side, other than guilt and/or a self-destructive streak.
In any event, the book starts fairly slow and there were a few times I considered ditching it. By the second half though, the lean prose gets more and more compelling, and the dilemmas get a bit more interesting. The final quarter or so takes the two men on a road trip from California to the Ozarks, in possible pursuit of the murderer. The climax is awfully gripping in a "y'all ain't from around here" Deliverance kind of way, and the final sentence packs a huge punch. ...Still, book's theme-that the Vietnam war did irreparable damage to the American psyche and values, and led to an America where money and consumption are king and justice is a mirage-emerges in full color, and the book remains an important picture of the empty '70s.
Note: This was made into a great dark film called Cutter's Way.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Recommended, February 4, 1998
By A Customer
Richard Bone is a handsome stud who uses women to his advantage. Alex Cutter is bitter Vietnam war vet: Crippled, relentlessly articulate, and seemingly always drunk, they make an unlikely friendship. That is until on day Bone witnesses a man dumping a dead body of a young woman; a man answering the description of a powerful business tycoon. So, pushed on by Cutter's vengeful maxims about the rich, they both decide to investigate in the hope of bringing the tycoon to book. But neither of them will ever guess the savage payoff. A powerful novel that deals with post-vietnam malaise and corporate power, this is highly recommended.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read This One It's a Real Find!, July 16, 2000
The film is a neglected classic, and the novel it was inspired by is likewise. It will hook you as a good thriller does, yet also profoundly engage you with it's extraordinary mixture of the poetic and the grittily, absurdly real. The Characterisation is rich and broad and constantly surprising - tough yet warm - and it is stylistically muscular in a Chandleresque way, without ever becoming arch. Touching movingly on so many issues from some extremely archetypal relationships to the state of post-Vietnam America, Thornburg takes you on a rollercoaster ride that you won't want to get off. Finally, as an exploration of messed-up masculine insecurity it is devastating and compulsive with that rare thing in such books,great female characters! Read the book, see the film - you won't forget either.
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