Customer Reviews

Cutter and Bone (Midnight Classics)

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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.

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.

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.

last year i picked up a copy of the book "1001 books you must read before you die." this book ("cutter and bone") was included as one of the 1001. i already had a copy of it. it had been in a cardboard box in one of my closets for about 20 years. so i dug it out and read it, and, unlike many of the other recommendations from "1001 books...," this was actually a very good book. like most noir novels, likeable characters are scarce. this is dark stuff, about unappealing people; but interesting and compulsively readable their lives are. the story is a wild one, and the author pulls it off in an unpretentious and seemingly effortless way. i felt not a false step among the pages. it struck me as believable from 1st page to last. all in all, an outstanding crime novel.

Thornburg breaths life into his characters like no one else I've read so far and the story flows easy.

There's an interview with him at twbooks.co.uk thornburginterview

I also read and liked his 'To Die in California' I'll try 'Dreamland' next.

They made a movie from this called Cutter's Way,which Thornburg calls mediocre. They left out Mo and Cutter's baby, which for me defined Mo and Cutter's character.

...but there's not a lot of action in this one. As for the much-vaunted "shocking end", well, I saw it a mile coming, but maybe that's only cause I read a lot of thrillers. All in all, an entertaining enough book, but let me stress this: Not in the Ross McDonald-Raymond Chandler-Walter Mosley-James Ellroy league.

A mystery (that holds until the last line), love story and commentary on post Vietnam America. Thornburg paints a collection of the most realistic characters I have come upon in an age.

Read it.

i read this book twice in a row on first reading, and that usually means one of two things: i'm not sure how i feel, and i need another go, or i love the book so unabashedly that there is nothing for it but to read it again right away. in this case, cutter and bone kicked my ass, and i'm still sort of reeling.

i read this book a year ago, in june 2010. it's not in my possession anymore, and i gave back my borrowed copy reluctantly. i need to buy it and read it again, and yet i'm glad i've taken some time between readings. i still think of it, often, how much i felt all the ugly joy, and loss and frustration that threads this book, and yet there is still joy; these characters are entirely engaged in their own disintegration, they scramble and they struggle to get it all figured out, they are tearing at the throat of life. thornburg's painted a vivid viceral world in words: the story washes in around me. i haven't said much about plot here but it's enough to say somebody witnesses a murder, and there is blackmail, and car chases, and sexy scenes in squalid circumstances, and a hell of a lot of fury.

two friends are at the centre of this book: cutter, the tortured, maimed vietnam vet, a genius, a puck, is balanced by richard bone, a former ad man gigolo, physically revolted by a conventional life, broken in his own way. the two embrace each other, scrape up against each other, and their symbiosis beats like a pulse through the suspense of the caper, the opportunity that cutter hangs all their hopes upon. cutter's girlfriend is named mo and the experience of reading her was nerve-wracking. it's rare i find characters in books with my name and she was so much my opposite in thornburg's description, and yet sharing a familiarly chaotic frame of mind that i wondered if he wasn't spying on me. mo is the third main figure of the novel: she influences both the men and the pattern of the novel but she is still secondary: she is their ophelia.

this is a perfectly paced, completely engaging and wonderfully written novel. the characters are etched they are so well drawn, and their voices will ring in your inner ear. it's raw. it's not exactly life-affirming, but it is as real as fiction gets, i think.

This book is many things, but it is not a murder mystery, despite the attempts of its first reviewers to stuff it into that format. In a murder mystery, someone (usually for a fee) learns who killed the victim, and generally finds out why the victim died, as well. In this story, there's a murder, all right, but Alex Cutter doesn't want to know whether or not his suspect actually committed it and Richard Bone would rather not know anything at all.

One has to admit that "Cutter and Bone" reads like a classic hard-boiled detective story. Many such tales take place in southern California, as this one does, and emphasize the irony of dark, sordid crimes done in a paradise of sunshine. There's one important difference, though, between those stories and Newton Thornburg's tale - there's no detective. Raymond Chandler himself once said of detective stories, including his own stories of Philip Marlowe, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." "Cutter and Bone" is a Marlowe story without Marlowe, without the man of principle who can hold everyone to account for what they do. There's no guarantee of any such justice for anyone here.

As the title implies, this is the story of Alex Cutter and Richard Bone's relationship, told from Richard's point of view. He's a former marketing executive who left his wife and children years before and now lives by seducing rich female tourists in Santa Barbara when he's not sponging off Alex and his wife Mo. Alex, the son of a once-wealthy family, spends his days and his intelligence antagonizing people, trusting his terrible Vietnam war wounds to protect him - he lost his left leg, arm and eye. Mo waits for Alex to come home drunk or angry and love her or strike her, relying on alcohol and pills to sustain her and refusing to contact her rich mother.

One night Richard sees, silhouetted against a pair of headlights, a heavyset man put something in a dumpster. The next morning he learns that the something was a teenage girl's corpse. He's quite sure he could never identify the man he saw, but later he sees a newspaper photograph of leading industrialist J.J. Wolfe, and finds himself whispering "That's him" in Alex's presence. At which point things start to get interesting.

Or maybe not. As I said, the point of this story is that it contains no Marlowe. It also contains no hard evidence or significant investigation. It has only Alex's conviction that Wolfe is guilty, of being a rich bastard if nothing else. Damaged as Alex is, his charisma carries all before it, including a very uneasy Richard Bone.

So no, this is not a murder mystery. It's the story of two friends and those around them using the death of a not-so-innocent teenage girl to force some meaning into their lives at all costs. Adding to that tale is Thornburg's setting and narrative. We're in Santa Barbara in the early 1970s, at the edge of the continent and the close of the American Century, where the endless sunshine bleeds the energy out of everything, including the characters. The old virtues ran dry long ago, the new ones are rapidly following suit, the war is over and there's nothing to believe in. At the opening of the story you get the impression that everyone, even loudmouth Alex, is tiptoeing around with great care lest they break through the surface of their lives and find themselves faced with the emptiness below their feet. The dead girl, tragic as her fate might be, arrives just in time.

The process of finding meaning is particularly difficult for Richard Bone, which makes him a good point-of-view character. As the novel opens he has already demonstrated that he has a hard time keeping any commitments or getting involved in anything permanent. A line in the movie version sums up his character pretty well; he's about to leave a bar where Alex, as usual, is stirring up trouble, and Alex snarls something like "Don't worry, gentlemen, that's just Richard Bone doing what he does best - walking away." Yet Richard can't seem to resist Alex's outrageous suggestions or ignore Mo's pain, even when he knows that getting involved will only lead to chaos. He knows his life is empty, and even tragedy is better than that.

And what's the tragedy? It's that Richard Bone would make a pretty good Philip Marlowe if he hadn't let himself be corrupted already. The author's descriptions of faux-Mexican Santa Barbara architecture, dirty dishes piled up in the sink, casual adultery and sunshine that burns off all shadows, shows us what Richard sees - a rotting world where principle only kills you quicker. Marlowe found some value in principle even when it brought him no reward. Richard has lost that faith and recoils at its very suggestion. He can't make himself stop caring, and he can't let himself care enough to make any difference to his friends. Not to give too much away, but that's what leads to his downfall.

This is not an uplifting tale, to put it mildly, but it's still worth reading for the narrative's skill. It puts us in a particular place and time and gives us sympathetic characters. Like Richard, we can get fed up with Alex and Mo for the way they waste their time and talents. We can get fed up with Richard for the same reason. I'd say that our annoyance, here as in life, is no more than a symptom of disappointed love, and it carries the story right through to the shocking conclusion, when you realize that maybe these people were right to opt out. It's a classic reversal, and finishes up the story with a refreshing jolt of outrage that may make Marlowes of us all in time.

Benshlomo says, If your conscience is asleep, wake it up, even if it hurts.

I saw the movie and thought it was hacked, but the book is worse. Thornburg seems to get lost with his wacked characters, who turn out not to be worth a damn anyway. I kept waiting for the "thriller" part, but it never showed. Maybe if you used to be from Santa Barbara in the 60's and wanted a bit of nostalgia, this'd be worth a read - even then you'd have to suspend your geographic memory! Anything by Criten (except the space ship thing), Connelly, Custler or even Jodi Picoult would be better! I may go back to watching TV...naw, just kidding.