Customer Reviews

Tough Luck

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Poor Mickey Prada is an 18-year-old shlemiel without a clue. He's just graduated from high school, has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He works at a fish market, is more or less supporting his father who has had strokes and has dementia. He primarily hangs out with his buddies, bowling, betting a little on football, striking out with girls.

And then a guy named Angelo comes into the store to buy some shrimp, complains that his bookie is out of town. Mickey agrees to place a bet for him, Angelo's team loses and he demands a chance to make his money back by placing another bet, Mickey is too frightened to refuse, and . . . well, you get the idea. The kid's life is now careering out of control and we're led into a noirish, frenetic, and, thanks to Starr's skill, funny rush that ends . . . well . . . Read the book!

It's all skilfully done, a nice follow-up to Starr's previous 'Cold Caller.'

Never read anything by this guy before this, but I sure will now! Wow! A master of concise character development, Starr has put together one gem of a fast reading look at the life of a young man trapped in his life in Brooklyn. You can only hang on for the ride as Mickey Prada makes one poor decision after another and watches his life go down the toilet. A likable enough guy, Mickey is not too bright. His inability to size up the situations in which he finds himself leads to the destruction of the limited life he knows. Crisp clipped dialogue and scenes rife with local color and characters give this short novel a stunning vibrancy.

The greats of noir fiction had a way of putting you inside the heads of the disenfranchised, the losers, even stone-cold, psychopathic killers. And the most skillful among them -- say, a Jim Thompson -- had the reader gradually empathasizing with these outcasts. Jason Starr can stand toe to toe with any of these authors. His _Tough Luck_ is an expertly written story.

Mickey Prada is a poor kid trying to make good. Working in a fish market while saving for college, he also takes care of his Alzheimer's-ridden Dad. Things are going pretty well for Mickey until a slick-looking mobster walks into the fish shop. Angelo Santoro starts talking football and betting with Mickey. Before long, Mickey's placing 'good faith' bets for Angelo. And Angelo keeps losing. Now Mickey's in the hole to his bookie and Angelo won't make good on his debt.

In order to get out of hock, his lifelong friend Chris proposes a house burglary with a few of their buddies. It'll be easy money, what with the homeowners on vacation. And Mickey will surely be able to pay off the bookie and maybe pick up some nice trinkets for his new girlfriend. It all sounds so simple. But nothing goes quite as you might expect -- and none of the well-drawn characters will ever be the same after _this_ caper.

Starr writes with exquisite attention to detail. The jargon of the early eighties... the fashion... the culture... all are snapshots wrapped around the realistic foibles of each character. I'll definitely be picking up the rest of Starr's books. It's easily some of the best noir fiction going.

Jason Starr has made a career writing novels like *Tough Luck.* They invariably tell the story of a relatively ordinary guy with some modest aspirations and a few flaws. The modest aspirations lead him into trouble and the few flaws end up magnified into grotesque proportions. One bad choice leads to another, and, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, ends with the worst of all possible choices. As a reader, you watch, helpless, and gruesomely fascinated, as the main character tries to do the equivalent of wiping away a speck of lint from a white suit with hands covered in red ink. It's a formula as old as Og the Caveman, but in the hands of a writer like Jason Starr it still works to perfection.

In *Tough Luck,* the ordinary guy is Mickey Prada--a 19-year-old working at a Brooklyn fish market. Mickey is going to college next fall. He's just taking a year off to save some money and take care of his ailing father. He's got plans, you see. He's not going to be gutting halibut for the rest of his life. One day a local comes in for his usual order of shrimp. He asks Mickey to do him a favor: place a bet for him with a neighborhood bookie. The guy is always well-dressed, sharp, an obvious player. A good guy for a guy with big plans to know. No?

No.

A bad choice it was to place that bet. The speck on the white suit. By the time Mickey is finished trying to pluck that speck off, he's practically drenched in blood--armed robbery, assault, murder. How could doing someone a simple favor possibly lead to all this? Mickey Prada shows you, step-by-step, with one seemingly well-thought-out, but unexpectedly disastrous, decision after another. The vicarious thrill the reader gets watching how quickly a normal life can veer into criminal nightmare has always been the chief appeal of this brand of hardboiled mystery and *Tough Luck* has that thrill in spades.

Starr writes a very serviceable, straightforward prose. He doesn't get in the way of the story. There isn't anything snazzy about his style, nothing distinctive or even memorable; it's an invisible style, like porn, the narrated events are everything, the only thing. There isn't a lot of interiority. Mickey Prada isn't a deep thinker. He isn't Raskolnikov. Starr provides just enough insight into Mickey's thinking; then he records the disaster that follows from there.

For what it is, a throwback to the gritty fiction of writers like Jim Thompson, *Tough Luck* is a fast, fun, and harrowing read that works on a small stage to tell a big story: the Homeric tragedy of the little guy trying to escape his predestined fall.

Teenager Mickey Prada works at Vincent's Fish Market in Brooklyn while sharing a flat with his Alzheimer's suffering father. Mickey counts pennies planning to attend Baruch and earn an accounting degree that is when he is not serving fresh fish to customers or searching for his father lost somewhere in Brooklyn. With his love life showing zero, his only positive is that his father has not found the train to Manhattan or Queens and even more teeth gnashing no thonks Da Bronx.

With his bookie, Mickey places losing bets for a fish customer Angelo Santoro. However, Angelo fails to pay up so now Mickey's credit is shot to hell and his body might soon follow. Desperate, Mickey and his buddies commit a failed robbery in the Manhattan Beach section of the borough. Though shocked with HARD FEELINGS, he goes home expecting the police to come, but instead learns he has funeral expenses as his father just died along with Mickey's dreams of a white-collar accounting job.

TOUGH LUCK is an amusing urban noir that spins darkly following the misadventures of Mickey through one blue note after another. This character study focuses on the aspirations of a youngster whose dreams seem so simple yet might as well be in another galaxy. Mickey is a great protagonist while his friends torturing him over his girlfriend void seems as real as the tour of Brooklyn's mean streets. Though not a spark of light to grow a tree in this black hole of a tale exists, fans of Jason Starr will relish this humorous trek through the rotted inside of the Big Apple.

Harriet Klausner

Mickey Prada is a simple guy living in Brooklyn in the 1980s. He lives with his Dad (who has Alzheimer's), works at the local fish market, hangs out with a couple guys from the neighborhood, doesn't have too much luck with the ladies. Basically, he's a schlep just marking time.

As the book begins, though, it looks like Mickey might just catch a break. He meets a nice Jewish girl from an upper middle class family who actually likes him back. His job is going well, even if he does stink like fish all the time. He even hooks up with a made guy who wants Mickey to lay off some bets for him. This could be his chance to move up in the world.

With Tough Luck, Starr has stepped away from the genre of Jim Thompson and Richard Stark to create a noir world that is not only bleak, but painfully funny. The interactions among his character, the dialog, and the sheer misery of it all can't help but amuse you. While reading it, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Instead I just sat back and enjoyed being in the hands of a craftsman at work. Bravo, Mr. Starr.

Reviewed by David Montgomery, Mystery Ink

I was looking to delve into the world of noir fiction writing. normally i read more conventional literature. Now i know why i steer clear of these pot boilers.
The main character was totally ridiculous. Do men like that really exist? Not too bright.
I honestly had to put it down about half way through because I just could not swallow any more of it.

Jason Starr has fiction chops to die for. Characters are beautifully drawn. The setttings are wonderfully depicted. But this thing is an awful mess. We start with a character who is not exactly a rocket scientist, but bedrock decent and hard working. Over the course of the book, he becomes a) a complete moron, b) a stalker, c) a burglar, d) a guy who steals from his employer. In other words, his basic character as a human being changes. If Starr was trying for humor, well, it's not funny. In fact, the overall feeling this book left me with was depression. I usually donate my used paperbacks to the local library. This one I'm going to throw out. I wouldn't want anyone else to have to read it.