Customer Reviews

Tough Guys Don't Dance

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

"Tough Guys Don't Dance" is a good old fashioned thriller set in a decaying seaside New England town inhabited by a motley assortment of wealthy elitists, drug dealers, fishermen, psychopaths, and brooding alcoholic tough guys like the hero Tim Madden. Someone has it in for Tim--a struggling novelist and former criminal. After a night of heavy drinking and quazi-amnesia, severed heads are turning up on his property and the passenger seat of his car is drenched in blood. Can he find the killer (s) before he gets blamed for the killings? Mailer builds up the suspense like a true master of mystery (even though mystery is not his primary field). There is also some fine writing in this book. It should be read aloud like poetry. More than a decade before "Pulp Fiction" Mailer knew how to mix a thrilling crime drama with interesting conversations and musings about life, love, and amature philosophy. As Tim tries to solve the mystery, he broods about ethnic and cultural differences {he is a mixture of Irish and Jewish and the town is mostly Portugese}, history {he is obsessed with the Pilgrims and other aspects of local history like "hell town" a 19th century vice district}, wives, parents and family life, cops, prison, alcohol, drugs, war and on and on. In the hands of a bad {or even average} writer, this would just get annoying, but Mailer carries it off well.

I picked this one up because I'd never read any Mailer and figured it was about time. Maybe I should have stuck with one of the classics, but the library was out of Armies of the Night and Naked and the Dead. No question, he can write, and had no trouble sustaining my interest for the 225 pages or so. But the premise that sucks you in -- man wakes up to find he's gotten a tatoo he can't remember getting, and may have been on a killing spree he also can't remember -- leads to a terribly convoluted tale that deserved -- and needed -- a much more careful rendering. Had Mailer taken twice as many pages and the trouble to lead the reader through the story, it might have been fascinating to see how the intricate plot developed, but after a hundred and fifty fun pages he just decides to throw the explanation for everything at you all at once, like a B-movie in which the villain for some unexplained reason just can't stop explaining his scheme to the hero before killing him. In fact, that's exactly what happens. I felt cheated, as though he just didn't want to bother.

Mailer had said that he wanted to write something fast, nasty and fun after the time and energy he lavished on two of brilliant and more ambitious projects, Ancient Evenings and Executioner's Song. Tough Guys Don't Dance is that book, in the tradition of Chandler, Hammett, Ross Macdonald. Tim Madden wakes up after a long life of wasting away as a binging alcoholic and finds his bed drenched in blood; later he finds his wife's severed head in a secret pot stash. He, however remembers none of it, and this provides Mailer ample room to ruminate about the metaphysics of hangovers and black outs and the perversions one finds themselves willing to commit when wealth and power are at stake. The cast of characters are unruly, pinched in the nerve and casting a faint whiff of what one imagines the store room where Dorian Gray's portrait was held in sick secrecy. Madden, hardly an innocent , stumbles and routs about trying to piece together the events of his last binge, terrified in the possibility that he might well be his wife's killer. This is the most horrible of personal journeys, the saga of a man seeking evidence as to whether he's a monster or merely a hapless dupe.Mailer's prose is breathtaking and poetic, and creates a tension with the gamy undertakings of the plot. This is not one of Mailer's masterworks, not be a long shot, but it has verve and drive and a splendidly sick wit, and it reminds us that Mailer can construct an odd tale and twist it in any direction he pleases.

"Tough Guys Don't Dance" is a good old fashioned thriller set in a decaying seaside New England town inhabited by a motley assortment of wealthy elitists, drug dealers, fishermen, psychopaths, and brooding alcoholic tough guys like the hero Tim Madden. Someone has it in for Tim--a struggling novelist and former criminal. After a night of heavy drinking and quazi-amnesia, severed heads are turning up on his property and the passenger seat of his car is drenched in blood. Can he find the killer (s) before he gets blamed for the killings? Mailer builds up the suspense like a true master of mystery (even though mystery is not his primary field). There is also some fine writing in this book. It should be read aloud like poetry. More than a decade before "Pulp Fiction" Mailer knew how to mix a thrilling crime drama with interesting conversations and musings about life, love, and amature philosophy. As Tim tries to solve the mystery, he broods about ethnic and cultural differences {he is a mixture of Irish and Jewish and the town is mostly Portugese}, history {he is obsessed with the Pilgrims and other aspects of local history like "hell town" a 19th century vice district}, wives, parents and family life, cops, prison, alcohol, drugs, war and on and on. In the hands of a bad {or even average} writer, this would just get anaoying, but Mailer carries it off well.

it is just entertaining, the kind of book you might read while you are at the dentist office, just waiting. it is not a great book, but it may keep you thrilled if you give it a chance. i guess the author will not get any prizes for this kind of book, but he reaches certain kind of people who reads this kind of stuff. not recommended for people who are lookinf for something great and beleive me, life is too short to read bad books.

LUIS MENDEZ luismendez@codetel.net.do

A frustrated writer awakens after a drinking binge to discover evidence that he may have committed murder. Like the hero of "An American Dream," he is mentally unstable and prone to superstition. Many have compared this novel to the books of Chandler and Hammett, but I did not find the prose to be as lean and mean as many reviewers would lead us to believe. Although the language is extraordinary, it is also filled with lengthy digressions, particularly toward the beginning, so much so that I began to despair of anything ever actually happening. Once the tale gets rolling, however, its a good one with terrific dialogue. Mailer brilliantly evokes a grim atmosphere in a struggling New England seacoast village.

"Tough Guys Don't Dance" is a haunting, brooding tour de force. Mailer's observational skills and psychological depth are hard to match. Tim Madden is equal parts anti-hero and anti-protagonist. Fitting in with Mailer's niche as journalism as fiction( i.e. "Armies of the Night"), Madden is usually not wise or honorable, just more so than those he encounters.

In his take on writing "The Spooky Art", Norman Mailer admitted that "Tough Guys Don't Dance" was written in a blur to get out of a contract. The book reads like it and Mailer reuses a number of lines he used before (such as Nelson Rockefeller having a mouth within a mouth which Mailer also used in his account of the 1968 GOP national convention). Mailer offers a murder mystery that includes his thoughts on the CIA, spirits and spooks, drugs, marriage, rich kids, boxing, relationships between fathers and sons, God's role in football games, writing, John Updike's descriptions of female bodies and a host of other subjects. An absurd number of bodies pile up. This book should have been a disaster but it is breezy, often funny and there are some strange, often memorable, characters. Is it a great book? No and it certainly is not one of Mailer's better books though it is one of his funniest. In his defense, Mailer was more than aware of this and he was not trying to write a great novel. But it is a fun romp through Cape Cod and the mind of Norman Mailer.

When I started reading this novel, I thought it was quite a boring read. The story moved too slowly, the chapters were too long and Norman Mailers language was too complex. It was like reading a detective novel too ambitious for it's own good, because since the plot isn't all that complicated it could have been made much more fast paced and exciting. However, the story constantly keeps on getting better, and in the end it is Mailers skill with language and form that makes you think you have read something special, allmost important.

The beginning of the novel was just enough to keep me interested. The only thing that prevented me from putting the book down was the analogy about the cigarettes and Tim Madden's wife which showed the concept of addiction. The novel gets more detailed and more twisted as you delve futher into it. Wife swaping all over the place. It's like a key party from the seventies, without the keys. The language was kept simple. The characters are people you could talk to, provide you want to use a machete to chop of someone's head and stash it in some mary jane. All in all, it was a book just to finish. The mean comedy of it was the only thing that made me hang on until the end.