Like his short story collection Kissing in Manhattan (2001), Schickler's debut novel is filled with passion, violence, and human quirks. Henry Dante, a heavy for Chicago mobster Honey Pobrinkis, has been sent along with two of Pobrinkis' men to retrieve the "Planets," a set of seven valuable diamonds in the shape of seven of the planets, from an untrustworthy business associate. But when one of the mobsters, Honey's sleazy nephew, Roger, tries to rape the man's wife, Henry knocks Roger out and makes off with the Planets. He winds up in a small Wisconsin town where Grace McGlone, a beautiful, passionate redhead spots him and knows he's the one for her. She jumps in his truck and insists on coming with him, but she won't sleep with him until they're married. And when she finds out about the Planets, she insists they give them away to people they meet along their journey as they flee Honey and his goons. Schickler is a rare find; with straightforward and yet deeply insightful writing, he mixes love, violence, ardor, and humor in this funny and heartbreaking modern-day fable. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Sweet and Vicious is funny, cool, surprisingly and wonderfully violent, has great characters, a ridiculously beautiful love story, a perfect ending. Read it.”
--James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces
"Think Bonnie and Clyde as it might have been written by Tom Robbins"
--Publishers Weekly
"Schickler is a rare find... he mixes love, violence, ardor, and humor in this funny and heartbreaking modern-day fable."
--Booklist, starred review
“Schickler ambitiously follows his fantastic 2001 story collection Kissing in Manhattan with a precious fairy-tale version of a bloody pulp novel…Schickler spins sentences in a way that keeps you in your seat.”
--Entertainment Weekly
"SWEET AND VICIOUS is impressive: it has a sharp wit and a sustained edge.... Mr. Schickler pierces straight through the everyday world with his deadpan vision."
--The New York Times
"A fun but thoughtful read for those who appreciate complicated collisions of opposites."
-- People
From the Inside Flap
"Fascinating and hilarious," "relentlessly clever," and "truly haunting" are all phrases that have been used to describe David Schickler's unique talent. And all apply to this brash, brilliant novel featuring two of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction: Grace McGlone and Henry Dante.
Sexy and willful, Grace McGlone is saving herself for the right man. When Henry Dante pulls into the small Wisconsin town where she works at the car wash, she instantly knows he's the one. He knows it too. But when Grace discovers Henry has "The Planets"—a stolen set of famous Spanish diamonds—stashed in the back seat of his truck, she's having none of it. She's "trying for heaven," and the ill-gotten jewels must go. And so they do, in a race across the American landscape from Chicago to Yellowstone, purusued by a savage gangster obsessed by the diamonds he thought were his.
Passionate, criminal, comical, and possessing all the dark enchantment of a fairy tale, Sweet and Vicious is a modern love story shot straight from the heart of David Schickler's miraculous imagination.
About the Author
DAVID SCHICKLER is a graduate of the Columbia University M.F.A. program. He is the author ofof Kissing in Manhattan, and his work has appeared The New Yorker, Tin House, Zoetrope: All Story, and Travel and Leisure. He lives with his wife in New York.
From The Washington Post
Three gangsters -- a mean one, a stupid one and Henry, the hoodlum with a heart of gold -- are on a job in rural Illinois when a hawk bursts through the windshield and dies. In its talons is a white squirrel, which survives and scampers away from the car. This is a heavy load of indecipherable metaphor for any book to carry, and, sure enough, Sweet and Vicious struggles to remain airborne.The three guys arrive at a sheep farm where an associate of theirs is about to abscond to Belize with millions of dollars' worth of ill-got diamonds and his pretty Playboy-centerfold wife. The mean guy is distracted by the wife from his original purpose (retrieving diamonds) and sets about assaulting her with a stick of butter. Being nice, Henry naturally objects to rape by dairy product. He feels sorry for the hapless, double-crossing couple, as well as for their sheep. So he beats his two comrades to a pulp, releases everybody, takes the diamonds and heads off in a pickup truck he found in the barn.
Within hours he's in Wisconsin, where he picks up Grace, a university-educated car-wash attendant. They're meant for each other -- she's a redhead, and he's got muscles -- so in she jumps, and a car chase across several states ensues, much like any road trip: The Badlands are the Badlands, and Montana turns out to have mountains.
Their courtship is brief. Within half an hour, Henry and Grace are in the back of the car, and he's "tasting not just her body but her whole female swirl, her IQ, and her humor, maybe even her womb." Greedy of him to taste her whole swirl, I thought. And what is her IQ? Shouldn't we be told?
There can be no "screwing"' (Grace's favorite word) until they're married, because Grace is "trying for heaven." She's been trying for it ever since being abruptly deflowered at 15 by a passing evangelical preacher. The incident still rankles with her. It rankles with me, too, not least for its suggestion of synaesthesia (surely the least exciting of psychic abilities):
"A power was brewing in her loins, a color she couldn't name but wanted to. . . ." Might that unnamed color be purple, by any chance? This is lazy prose, masquerading as intuitive. Schickler writes better about sex when he sticks to the bare facts. After Grace and Henry marry later that day, they celebrate by "screwing" against the back of a fried dough booth at a country carnival, in full view of the donut boy, and eating beignets all the while. For once Schickler refrains from trying to tell us what sex feels like, and lets the scene stand on its own.
But we never find out who these people are. Schickler expects us to care about their troubles without ever making them real. He merely assembles a hodgepodge of detail about everybody, assigning each new character an eccentric trait or two, as if this will suffice to form them into well-rounded and endearing personalities for us. It doesn't. It's repetitive, meaningless and patronizing. Can't anyone just be ordinary?
One of the gangsters eats blueberries in merlot all the time and reads Thoreau. Two boys "excelled at chess and loved Pink Floyd," another "was fearful of nuclear winter," a fourth "would visit Laos in August with his parents and his stomach would tolerate the trip poorly." The mean gangster's conquests include "a Communist in thongs" and a "ticklish vegan." And there's a particularly irritating girl called Color who can "smell brush fires at their discarded-match inception." Schickler throws magical realism around as if it grows on trees.
He also assumes we care about the plight -- and preoccupations -- of teenagers. The book is littered with totemic teenage stuff, a high school world in which money matters, male strength matters, as do the formal dance, sex, guns and ESP. Cars really matter. Add a little home-baked Christianity, and you begin to feel you're in a teenager's bedroom. (I wasn't interested in teenagers even when I was one.)
The title implies some sort of battle between good and evil, body and soul, Bonnie and Clyde -- the War and Peace of Chicago gangsterdom, the Pride and Prejudice of car journeys. But Schickler never manages to tease a real dilemma out of this wandering tale -- it's just viciously sweet. He had some success with his first book, a collection of stories, Kissing in Manhattan, but this novel shows the saggy elastic of an over-elongated tale. Drastically condensed, it might make a good three-minute ad for Christianity, aimed at teenagers. But who needs that?
Reviewed by Lucy Ellmann
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
Earth . . .
We’re driving on the highway in the Buick when a hawk crashes through our windshield.
“Holy hell,” says Floyd, and Roger and I say stuff too. The car swerves.
Brap, screeches the hawk. It’s dying, then it dies. It’s stuck through our windshield, its body on the hood and its head inside, like it’s peeking through curtains, checking things out backstage. There are spikes of glass, I spill my Big Gulp, and the hawk has a squirrel in its talons.
“Dammit.” Sprite fills the crotch of my jeans. I’m riding shotgun.
“There’s a hawk in our windshield,” shouts Floyd. He sounds awed or thrilled. He’s in the backseat. Wind whistles in around the hawk’s body, which is wedged tight. Roger, who’s driving, fights with the wheel.
“There’s a hawk in our windshield,” shouts Floyd, “and there’s glass everywhere.”
Roger pulls over. We take deep breaths. It’s six in the morning, no other cars around. There are ribbons of fog over the highway, points of dew in the roadside grass. Also, hanging dead before us is a red-tailed king of the skies.
“Wow,” says Roger. He’s got on black leather driving gloves.
“The hawk is holding a rat or something,” says Floyd.
It’s early May, the new millennium. I’m thirty-two and I bust people’s heads for Honey Pobrinkis, a Chicago gangster. Floyd’s my partner in the head-busting department. He wears his blond hair in a biker’s ponytail, and he’s as dumb as tundra, but he’s got a photographic memory, which comes in handy. As for Roger, he’s forty. He’s Honey’s nephew, but he’s only a mob guy in the summer. From September to April, Roger attends the University of Chicago, where he’s getting a master’s in anthropology.
“Honey’s gonna flip,” says Floyd. “His car is fucked.”
“Quiet,” says Roger, brushing glass off his jacket. He wears a suit and tie wherever we go.
“Honey’s ride has been fucked by a hawk and a rat.”
“Quiet, Floyd,” insists Roger.
I stare at the mangled former hawk. He’s beautiful and lordly, but he’s been dethroned. Just before the crash, I was actually thinking of animals—not hawks or squirrels, but sheep. The sheep I was pondering belong to Charles Chalk, whose head we’re on our way to busting. Charles is Honey’s diamond dealer. He lives west of Chicago, out Route 90, on a farm in Hampshire, Illinois. I visited his farm years back and admired his sheep. There were dozens of them. They were black and white and fenced in and they made noises that meant Save Me.
“Oh, man.” Floyd gets out of the car, looks at the windshield. He whistles long and low, shaking his head. “Oh, man. We have witnessed the fucking of a Buick.”
Roger finishes picking glass off his torso. He wears a porkpie hat, day and night, and under the hat is a black buzz cut with one weird white streak near the left temple. Roger’s smart, built, and mean. I’ve never crossed him.
“Oh, man,” says Floyd, “the hood’s dented. If Honey were here, he’d kill that hawk, point-blank.”
“The hawk died on impact,” says Roger.
Floyd creases his eyes. “It got off easy.”
I watch the hawk, whose fierce, shredded head hangs two feet before mine. I see no bullet wounds or other signs of why the beast kamikaze’d. What I see is the squirrel, out on the hood. Amazingly, he’s wriggling free of the hawk’s talons. He’s alive, with pure white fur.
“Shitbox.” Floyd, who’s just twenty-six, makes a reverent sound. “The rat’s still kicking.”
“It’s not a rat, it’s a squirrel.” Roger looks in the side-view, reangles his porkpie. “You all right, Henry?”
I don’t answer. The squirrel has liberated himself, and now he sits on his haunches, gazing at me through the windshield. There’s some powdered glass in his fur, but he’s still got a sporting chance in this world.
“Squirrels are brown.” Floyd folds his arms. There’s a cornfield behind him, and fog over the cornfield, and the sun’s coming up.
“Well,” says Roger, “this one’s white.”
The squirrel regards me. Other than the glinting powdered glass, his coat is free of blood or trauma, and his eyes are voids, black holes, like he could go on the news tonight, or home to the wife, or straight to hell, he doesn’t care.
How far’d you fall? I wonder.
“Fine,” says Floyd. “Three white guys, one white squirrel, one bashed-in Buick. That’s the scenario.”
The squirrel stares at me. I’ve seen dark, dead eyes like his exactly once, on a Cabrini-Green mark who owed Honey five grand last year. I cornered the mark around midnight outside a convenience store where he’d bought a six-pack of Schlitz. I got the guy in an alley and cracked his beer bottles over his head, but his eyes stayed gone, even when the blood trickled in.
“Yo. Henry Dante. You with us?” Roger punches the windshield in front of me, making me jump. The squirrel scampers off the hood, into the cornfield.
Floyd glares after the creature. “Fucking thing.”
I blink at Roger.
“So, you’re there after all.” He notices my wet lap. “What’d you do, piss yourself?”
“It’s soda,” I say.
“Floyd,” says Roger, “pull the hawk out and chuck him. Let’s get to the farm.”
Floyd stands in his jeans and his black tank top, which he wears year-round, heat wave or blizzard. His breath comes in vapors, and he watches them like they’re crucial to the scene. Floyd loves a crisis. He once had a nonspeaking part in his high school play, where he tolled a bell to indicate a man’s death. I hear about the bell frequently.
“Oh, man,” says Floyd. “I was already having a lousy morning. Now Honey’s Buick is fucked? This is the last straw.”
Roger cracks his neck, watches the sky getting bluer, grins. Roger can do that, love colors one minute, club someone the next. He weighs only a hundred and ninety, but Roger’s a Pobrinkis. He’s killed men, led hitting crews. Floyd and I just do head-busting and bringbacks, so Roger’s in charge.
“This is the straw that humped the camel.” Floyd yanks out the hawk carcass, tosses it, pulls glass from the windshield like icicles.
“Broke his back, you mean,” says Roger.
Floyd considers this. “No. Humped him.”
“Broke the camel’s back.” Roger lights a cigarette. When he killed his first mark, he ran the guy over with a stolen cab, then left the cab on top of the guy, the meter running.
“This is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Roger. “That’s what you were trying to say.”
Floyd gets his defensive look. He purses his lips. “I said what I said.”
“Straws don’t hump camels,” says Roger. “No wonder you didn’t get speaking parts.”
“Oh, man. Fuck you. I tolled the bell.”
“Get in the car,” says Roger.
Floyd reclaims the backseat, and Roger revs up, pulls out. I’m still thinking about the squirrel. Air gushes through the windshield.
“There’s an absence in our windshield now.” Floyd speaks over the wailing air. “There’s an abyss.”
Roger keeps checking his eyes at me. He likes my voice more than I do. “What’s the word, Henry? Hawk plummets from the heavens. Accident or omen?”
I’ve worked strong-arm for Honey Pobrinkis for seven years. Honey owns Chicago bistros, Vegas casinos, Canadian whores, the whole shebang, but his fetish is diamonds. He’s the Adam Smith of the black market ice trade from Moscow to Mayberry. The rumor is, Honey has a five-carat, internally flawless back molar, but he never smiles or laughs, so I can’t confirm this. Anyway, crewing for the Pobrinkis family, I’ve learned how to wait in cars, shatter jaws, keep my mouth shut. I’ve never killed anyone, though, or been on a hitting crew, or even wheelman for a hitting crew. I’m privately proud of these facts. My soul has a sporting chance.
“I don’t know,” I tell Roger.
Roger chews his Chesterfield. He half smokes cigarettes and half eats them.
“I believe in omens,” announces Floyd.
“Floyd,” says Roger, “would you do me the profound courtesy of shutting the fuck up?”
Floyd leans an elbow on each of our seats. He has a skinny orphan’s frame, and marks never guess the crazy strength in his arms. “I just think there’s omens.”
Roger taps the steering wheel. “Forget the omens. Our concern is Charles Chalk.”
