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Cutter and Bone
The headline reads ? LOCAL GIRL SLAIN, BODY FOUND IN TRASHCAN. When Richard Bone sees a picture of conglomerate tycoon J.J. Wolfe in the newspaper, he's struck by how closely he resembles the man Bone saw dumping the body: could this millionaire redneck be the killer? Bone's close friend Cutter, a crippled Vietnam vet, is convinced that Wolfe is the killer. With nothing much more to lose, the reckless Cutter and handsome gigolo Bone hit the road to the Wolfe headquarters in the Ozarks, totally unprepared for what awaits them. Cutter and Bone are two of the most brilliantly drawn characters in modern American fiction. Cutter and Bone is a brilliant look at the underbelly of post-Vietnam America. Filmed and immortalized as Cutter's Way, this new edition marks the return of one of the greatest American post-war novels.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Newton Thornburg
12 books40 followersBorn in Harvey, Illinois, Thornburg graduated from the University of Iowa with a Fine Arts degree. He worked in a variety of jobs before devoting himself to writing full-time (or at least in tandem with his cattle farm in the Ozarks) in 1973.
His 1976 novel Cutter and Bone was filmed in 1981 as Cutter's Way. The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind for ten years." Another novel-to film Beautiful Kate was filmed in Australia in 2009 and starred Bryan Brown and Ben Mendelsohn. It was directed by Rachel Ward, who is Bryan Brown's real-life wife.
Thornburg died on May 9, 2011, a few days shy of his 82nd birthday.
His 1976 novel Cutter and Bone was filmed in 1981 as Cutter's Way. The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind for ten years." Another novel-to film Beautiful Kate was filmed in Australia in 2009 and starred Bryan Brown and Ben Mendelsohn. It was directed by Rachel Ward, who is Bryan Brown's real-life wife.
Thornburg died on May 9, 2011, a few days shy of his 82nd birthday.
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April 21, 2020
This crime novel begins in Santa Barbara, in the mid '70's, but this is not the country of Ross Macdonald. Instead, it is the land of Macdonald's lost children, the ones detective Lew Archer pitied and helped but could never quite seem to understand.
Those damaged young people have “grown up” now, full of self-destructive impulses and desperate visions: Richard Bone, the feckless gigolo, in flight from the American Dream Achieved (an ad executive position, a wife, two kids); his cynical friend Alex Cutter, the drunken one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged Vietnam vet, who delights in vicious put-downs, outrageous scenes, and conspiracy theories; and Mo, daughter of a well-to-do family, the pill-popping, wine-drinking mother of Cutter's infant son.
One evening, Bone unwittingly catches a glimpse of someone chucking a woman's body into the trash, and later tells Cutter he “thinks” he knows who the “someone” is: J.J. Wolfe, Missouri good ol' boy and head of a major American corporation. It's not clear whether Cutter wishes to blackmail Wolfe or bring him to justice, but soon his investigations—and even more, his flamboyant and obnoxious behavior—expose himself, his friend and his family to grave danger.
As I said, this isn't Ross Macdonald, so do not expect to see a complicated plot tidily resolved. This is a crime novel, but it is a serious novel too, about the waning years of Vietnam and its impact on the generation most closely affected by it. And—I would argue—it is a great novel, which lays bare the scarred, desiccated heart of America by depicting its human casualties—Bone, Cutter, Mo, and others--with honest cynicism, dark humor and cold compassion, revealing the disillusion and chaos these lost souls carry inside.
(How did I manage to miss this great book up to now? I love the 1981 movie, Cutter's Way, directed by Ivan Passer and starring Jeff Bridges, John Heard and Lisa Eichorn as Bone, Cutter and Mo. The ending—although startling and effective—is inferior to the book's, but it is a marvelous film nonetheless, a classic unfairly neglected. Which—come to think of it—the book is too.)
July 17, 2018
Pirates might seem like they'd be a fun to cruise around with, and while Cutter and Bone, the black as midnight novel by Newton Thornburg published in 1976, has that marauding spirit to it, a sense of dread began to build as I realized the ship was headed for a reef and was not turning around. Set in the margins of the jeweled beach resort of Santa Barbara, California during economic recession following the Vietnam War, this is a mystery for readers who hate whodunits, a buddy story for those who think the worst thing the characters ever did was meet each other, an explosive device that left me feeling as bombed out as its title characters.
Richard Bone is introduced in a motel bathroom shaving with a Lady Remington belonging to a vacationing schoolteacher from Fargo that he seduced on the beach a few days ago. Sharing shrimp and champagne, Bone--who doesn't look it, but describes himself as a bum sleeping on the floor of a guy two months behind on his rent--is as uncomfortable accepting the woman's hospitality as she is essentially paying for sex. Bone walks out on her and climbs into a classic 1948 MG-TC with a running board and wire wheels that he was given two years ago by a woman he met in Acapulco and drifted into Santa Barbara with.
Driving along Anapamu Street, Bone's MG runs out of gas and Bone has to hoof it in a cold spring rain. He observes a car swerve into an alley next to an apartment complex. A man whose face he never gets a good look at climbs out and dumps something that looks like golf clubs into a trash barrel. Reaching the house he's crashing at, Bone is greeted by Maureen ("Mo"), a myopic, chain smoking blonde and his friend's woman who might have been more than a friend had they met under different circumstances. Hitting the shower, Bone is interrupted by Alex Cutter, father of Mo's infant son, who barges into the bathroom to puke.
Bone, dry now, felt like killing him. What a sight the man made, what a celebration of the grotesque: the thinning Raggedy Ann hair, the wild hawk face glowing with the scar tissue of too many plastic surgeries, the black eyepatch over the missing eye and the perennial apache dancer's costume of tight black pants and black turtleneck sweater with the left sleeve knotted below the elbow, not pinned up or sewed but knotted, an advertisement, spit in your eye.
Bone discovers that Cutter has brought home a Vietnam vet aspiring to eco-terrorism and a black chick who hitched up with him from L.A. She notices police activity down the street. Cutter's neighbor reports that the body of a teenage girl has been found dumped in a trashcan. Bone confides to his friends that he saw it happen, but didn't get a good look at the killer and would have nothing to tell the police. The eco-terrorist disagrees and Bone has to physically restrain him from calling the cops. Bone further alienates their houseguest by making him sleep on the deck while Bone curls up by the fireplace with the black chick. In the morning, he's woken by Santa Barbara's finest.
Under interrogation, Bone discovers that the victim was a seventeen-year-old cheerleader who died of a crushed trachea and fractured skull. The cops agree to release Bone only after he tells his story to the victim's twenty-three year old sister, Valerie, who impresses Bone with her calm. His car impounded, Bone is taken to breakfast by Cutter and Mo, where he reads a newspaper article on the victim, Pamela Durant, as well as a piece on the firebombing last night of a car belonging to business tycoon J.J. Wolfe, visiting Santa Barbara for a conference. Bone blurts out, "It's him." Clarifying that he only meant Wolfe looked like the man he saw in the alley, Cutter sees a connection.
Alex Cutter subsists on the disability check he receives each month from Uncle Sam, the result of stepping on a Claymore in Vietnam. He spends his time raging against the world but also imagines how far a few thousand dollars could go toward plastic surgery and setting him up on some tropical island. Bone was for a time a successful marketing V.P. in Milwaukee, but walked out on his life, a wife and two children in a quarter life crisis. He now lives day by day, above it all, able bodied but soft in the head. Cutter makes a few inquiries on J.J. Wolfe and bringing Valerie Durant along, hatches a scheme to blackmail the tycoon. They ask Bone to participate.
"But let me tell you, my friend. Just this once, just for the hell of it, for my own amusement, I think maybe I'll let you into the holy of holies, for a moment or two and give you a taste of truth for a change, my truth, Richie, and it is simply this--I don't like this motherfucker. Wolfe and all the motherfuckers like him, all the movers and shakers of this world, kiddo, because I saw them too many times, and I saw the people they moved and shook. I saw the soft white motherfuckers in their civvies and flak jackets come slicking in from Long Binh to look us over out in the boonies, see that everything was going sweet and smooth, the killing and the cutting and the sewing up, and then they'd grunt and fart and squeeze their way back into their choppers and slick back to Washington or Wall Street or Peoria and say on with the show, America, a few more bombs will do it, a few more arms and legs. And I don't care if they were as smooth as the Bundys or as cornpone as Senator Eastland or this cat Wolfe, one fact was always the same, is always the same--it's never their ass they lay on the line, man, never theirs, but ours, mine."
While the mystery is packed away in coach by Thornburg and his morally despairing characters often threaten to ground the plane, I stuck with the book, which gave me the rush of watching someone pour a Molotov cocktail in their garage, look for something to throw it at, and then whip out a lighter. There are men like Cutter and Bone in every bar in America, angered by the realization that those with money get to call the shots and those without often compromise something in themselves--dignity, health, morality--in exchange for money they need to survive. That's not untrue, but Thornburg shows how those resigned to allowing others to make decisions for them end up regretting it.
If Bone learned anything at all in high school it was the importance of initial decisions, those casual first steps that could effortlessly lead to a second step and then a third and before one knew it had locked him in some miserable marathon without end. It was a lesson he learned best of all in freshman track, a sport he was really not at all interested in and probably would not have even gone out for if it had not been for the urging of his father, who had earned his only varsity letter as a member of the mile relay team back in the good old Jim Crow days when white boys only had to run against other white boys. So Bone had gone along, had suited up and run with the rest of the hopefuls, not very fast actually, just trying to stay with the crowd, that was all. But for some reason the coach had liked his stride and had singled him out: "You, Bone--think you could run the mile?" And Bone, indifferent, had shrugged: "Sure. Why not?"
I know an author is doing something right when I start advising characters to make better decisions, which like most of us, they never hear. Thornburg does a masterful job conveying the natural beauty of a California beach city as well as its creeping artifice, but it's the nihilistic surrender of his characters that will stay with me. The novel was adapted into an overlooked classic movie in 1981 titled Cutter's Way with John Heard as Cutter and Jeff Bridges as Bone and virtuoso cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, who'd light Blade Runner and Stop Making Sense and conjured the beauty of darkness equally well for director Ivan Passer.
Richard Bone is introduced in a motel bathroom shaving with a Lady Remington belonging to a vacationing schoolteacher from Fargo that he seduced on the beach a few days ago. Sharing shrimp and champagne, Bone--who doesn't look it, but describes himself as a bum sleeping on the floor of a guy two months behind on his rent--is as uncomfortable accepting the woman's hospitality as she is essentially paying for sex. Bone walks out on her and climbs into a classic 1948 MG-TC with a running board and wire wheels that he was given two years ago by a woman he met in Acapulco and drifted into Santa Barbara with.
Driving along Anapamu Street, Bone's MG runs out of gas and Bone has to hoof it in a cold spring rain. He observes a car swerve into an alley next to an apartment complex. A man whose face he never gets a good look at climbs out and dumps something that looks like golf clubs into a trash barrel. Reaching the house he's crashing at, Bone is greeted by Maureen ("Mo"), a myopic, chain smoking blonde and his friend's woman who might have been more than a friend had they met under different circumstances. Hitting the shower, Bone is interrupted by Alex Cutter, father of Mo's infant son, who barges into the bathroom to puke.
Bone, dry now, felt like killing him. What a sight the man made, what a celebration of the grotesque: the thinning Raggedy Ann hair, the wild hawk face glowing with the scar tissue of too many plastic surgeries, the black eyepatch over the missing eye and the perennial apache dancer's costume of tight black pants and black turtleneck sweater with the left sleeve knotted below the elbow, not pinned up or sewed but knotted, an advertisement, spit in your eye.
Bone discovers that Cutter has brought home a Vietnam vet aspiring to eco-terrorism and a black chick who hitched up with him from L.A. She notices police activity down the street. Cutter's neighbor reports that the body of a teenage girl has been found dumped in a trashcan. Bone confides to his friends that he saw it happen, but didn't get a good look at the killer and would have nothing to tell the police. The eco-terrorist disagrees and Bone has to physically restrain him from calling the cops. Bone further alienates their houseguest by making him sleep on the deck while Bone curls up by the fireplace with the black chick. In the morning, he's woken by Santa Barbara's finest.
Under interrogation, Bone discovers that the victim was a seventeen-year-old cheerleader who died of a crushed trachea and fractured skull. The cops agree to release Bone only after he tells his story to the victim's twenty-three year old sister, Valerie, who impresses Bone with her calm. His car impounded, Bone is taken to breakfast by Cutter and Mo, where he reads a newspaper article on the victim, Pamela Durant, as well as a piece on the firebombing last night of a car belonging to business tycoon J.J. Wolfe, visiting Santa Barbara for a conference. Bone blurts out, "It's him." Clarifying that he only meant Wolfe looked like the man he saw in the alley, Cutter sees a connection.
Alex Cutter subsists on the disability check he receives each month from Uncle Sam, the result of stepping on a Claymore in Vietnam. He spends his time raging against the world but also imagines how far a few thousand dollars could go toward plastic surgery and setting him up on some tropical island. Bone was for a time a successful marketing V.P. in Milwaukee, but walked out on his life, a wife and two children in a quarter life crisis. He now lives day by day, above it all, able bodied but soft in the head. Cutter makes a few inquiries on J.J. Wolfe and bringing Valerie Durant along, hatches a scheme to blackmail the tycoon. They ask Bone to participate.
"But let me tell you, my friend. Just this once, just for the hell of it, for my own amusement, I think maybe I'll let you into the holy of holies, for a moment or two and give you a taste of truth for a change, my truth, Richie, and it is simply this--I don't like this motherfucker. Wolfe and all the motherfuckers like him, all the movers and shakers of this world, kiddo, because I saw them too many times, and I saw the people they moved and shook. I saw the soft white motherfuckers in their civvies and flak jackets come slicking in from Long Binh to look us over out in the boonies, see that everything was going sweet and smooth, the killing and the cutting and the sewing up, and then they'd grunt and fart and squeeze their way back into their choppers and slick back to Washington or Wall Street or Peoria and say on with the show, America, a few more bombs will do it, a few more arms and legs. And I don't care if they were as smooth as the Bundys or as cornpone as Senator Eastland or this cat Wolfe, one fact was always the same, is always the same--it's never their ass they lay on the line, man, never theirs, but ours, mine."
While the mystery is packed away in coach by Thornburg and his morally despairing characters often threaten to ground the plane, I stuck with the book, which gave me the rush of watching someone pour a Molotov cocktail in their garage, look for something to throw it at, and then whip out a lighter. There are men like Cutter and Bone in every bar in America, angered by the realization that those with money get to call the shots and those without often compromise something in themselves--dignity, health, morality--in exchange for money they need to survive. That's not untrue, but Thornburg shows how those resigned to allowing others to make decisions for them end up regretting it.
If Bone learned anything at all in high school it was the importance of initial decisions, those casual first steps that could effortlessly lead to a second step and then a third and before one knew it had locked him in some miserable marathon without end. It was a lesson he learned best of all in freshman track, a sport he was really not at all interested in and probably would not have even gone out for if it had not been for the urging of his father, who had earned his only varsity letter as a member of the mile relay team back in the good old Jim Crow days when white boys only had to run against other white boys. So Bone had gone along, had suited up and run with the rest of the hopefuls, not very fast actually, just trying to stay with the crowd, that was all. But for some reason the coach had liked his stride and had singled him out: "You, Bone--think you could run the mile?" And Bone, indifferent, had shrugged: "Sure. Why not?"
I know an author is doing something right when I start advising characters to make better decisions, which like most of us, they never hear. Thornburg does a masterful job conveying the natural beauty of a California beach city as well as its creeping artifice, but it's the nihilistic surrender of his characters that will stay with me. The novel was adapted into an overlooked classic movie in 1981 titled Cutter's Way with John Heard as Cutter and Jeff Bridges as Bone and virtuoso cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, who'd light Blade Runner and Stop Making Sense and conjured the beauty of darkness equally well for director Ivan Passer.
July 13, 2020
Crítica feroz a la sociedad post-Vietnam norteamericana.
Thornburg utiliza un asesinato y un testigo que ha visto una sombra para relatarnos la crudeza de la vida de aquellos que lucharon por EEUU y que, a la vuelta, no encajaban en ningún sitio y siguieron el camino de la autodestrucción y de la autocompasión.
Al principio, es una novela divertida dónde los diálogos son chispeantes y los personajes te hacen gracia. Pero la novela coge un rumbo pausado hacia la decrepitud y la paranoia. Te vas dando cuenta de que lo que al principio te hacía gracia, al final, te entristece. Y acaba siendo una novela de desesperanza.
Unos diálogos deslumbrantes. Unos personajes histriónicos, sobre todo Cutter, y muy bien caracterizados.
Es una novela maravillosa, a pesar de toda la miseria que nos cuenta.
Fierce criticism of North American post-Vietnam society.
Thornburg uses a murder and a witness who has seen a shadow to tell us the harshness of the lives of those who fought for the United States and who, when they returned, did not fit in anywhere and followed the path of self-destruction and self-pity.
At first, it is a fun novel where the dialogues are sparkling and the characters make you laugh. But the novel takes a leisurely course towards decrepitude and paranoia. You realize that what made you funny at the beginning, saddens you in the end. And it ends up being a novel of despair.
Dazzling dialogues. Histrionic characters, especially Cutter, and very well characterized.
It is a wonderful novel, despite all the misery it tells us.
Thornburg utiliza un asesinato y un testigo que ha visto una sombra para relatarnos la crudeza de la vida de aquellos que lucharon por EEUU y que, a la vuelta, no encajaban en ningún sitio y siguieron el camino de la autodestrucción y de la autocompasión.
Al principio, es una novela divertida dónde los diálogos son chispeantes y los personajes te hacen gracia. Pero la novela coge un rumbo pausado hacia la decrepitud y la paranoia. Te vas dando cuenta de que lo que al principio te hacía gracia, al final, te entristece. Y acaba siendo una novela de desesperanza.
Unos diálogos deslumbrantes. Unos personajes histriónicos, sobre todo Cutter, y muy bien caracterizados.
Es una novela maravillosa, a pesar de toda la miseria que nos cuenta.
Fierce criticism of North American post-Vietnam society.
Thornburg uses a murder and a witness who has seen a shadow to tell us the harshness of the lives of those who fought for the United States and who, when they returned, did not fit in anywhere and followed the path of self-destruction and self-pity.
At first, it is a fun novel where the dialogues are sparkling and the characters make you laugh. But the novel takes a leisurely course towards decrepitude and paranoia. You realize that what made you funny at the beginning, saddens you in the end. And it ends up being a novel of despair.
Dazzling dialogues. Histrionic characters, especially Cutter, and very well characterized.
It is a wonderful novel, despite all the misery it tells us.
December 12, 2019
Es esta una de esas novelas que, como otras mil –salimos a una por mes, más o menos-, ha sido ampliamente calificada como de obra-maestra-injustamente-olvidada. Con un más que apropiado escepticismo ante este tipo de titulares pero con la confianza que la editorial Sajalín me merece, me hice con ella y acerté.
Se dice que es una novela del género negro, aunque tal clasificación sea inmediatamente matizada con expresiones del tipo “poco convencional” o “rompedora de esquemas”. Verdaderamente tiene sus buenos ramalazos del género (mención especial a los magníficos diálogos), pero de igual forma podría calificarse como una novela de carretera o una historia de esas que dicen de colegas. Para mí, es una novela y punto, una muy buena novela, de esas que te ronda por la cabeza durante mucho tiempo una vez la terminas.
Y eso que tiene algunos puntos en contra, como que al autor se le vaya la mano en alguna ocasión con sus diatribas o con alguna que otra escena superflua o alargada en exceso que rompen innecesariamente el ritmo de la narración, fantástico, por otra parte, durante la mayor parte del relato. El final tampoco jugó a su favor, recuerda demasiado al de una mítica película de los sesenta de la que me guardaré muy mucho de desvelar aquí el título (aunque he de reconocer que, al igual que aquella vez en el cine, también aquí me quedé un buen rato pegado a la butaca sin poder mover una pestaña). Pero qué le voy a hacer si tengo esa querencia por estos personajes de perdedores, si me chiflan las historias del sueño americano convertido en pesadilla, si me hierve la sangre con esos hijosdeputa de la América profunda, fanáticos de religión, patriotismo y violencia.
Cutter es un personaje de esos que por sí solos justifican una historia, vástago de una familia arruinada (ningún personaje principal procede de los barrios bajos, precisamente), ha salido de Vietnam hecho un trapito físico y mental. Encolerizado con todo y con todos, incluido él mismo, vive de una mísera pensión de guerra entre sarcasmos y borracheras al lado de una hermosa mujer, a la que parece castigar y despreciar por el mero hecho de amarlo, y del hijo común del que solo es consciente cuando este le molesta con sus irritantes lloros. A este hogar feliz se acopla Bone que, ahogado en una vida de joven ejecutivo de éxito, mujer, dos hijos y casa con jardín, lo abandona todo por una vida sin rumbo ni horizonte y en la que sobrevive a costa de las mujeres que se va encontrando por el camino. Dos jodidos perdedores, mucho menos inteligentes de lo que ellos se creen, que intentan jugar una última partida con la vida apostándose el resto y sabiendo y no queriendo saber que las cartas están marcadas y ellos son los primos.
La impresión es que Newton Thornburg escribió la novela en un estado de cabreo importante (quizás esa es la razón por la que se le fuera la mano en ciertas ocasiones), asqueado de toda esa vertiente negrísima del ser humano que tan bien representa una buena parte de su país, con una mala hostia del quince hacia esas cumbres infectas a las que puede llegar este sistema y esta sociedad a poco que se la deje a su aire y sin control, y con una desesperanza mortal sobre las posibilidades del ser humano.
Se dice que es una novela del género negro, aunque tal clasificación sea inmediatamente matizada con expresiones del tipo “poco convencional” o “rompedora de esquemas”. Verdaderamente tiene sus buenos ramalazos del género (mención especial a los magníficos diálogos), pero de igual forma podría calificarse como una novela de carretera o una historia de esas que dicen de colegas. Para mí, es una novela y punto, una muy buena novela, de esas que te ronda por la cabeza durante mucho tiempo una vez la terminas.
Y eso que tiene algunos puntos en contra, como que al autor se le vaya la mano en alguna ocasión con sus diatribas o con alguna que otra escena superflua o alargada en exceso que rompen innecesariamente el ritmo de la narración, fantástico, por otra parte, durante la mayor parte del relato. El final tampoco jugó a su favor, recuerda demasiado al de una mítica película de los sesenta de la que me guardaré muy mucho de desvelar aquí el título (aunque he de reconocer que, al igual que aquella vez en el cine, también aquí me quedé un buen rato pegado a la butaca sin poder mover una pestaña). Pero qué le voy a hacer si tengo esa querencia por estos personajes de perdedores, si me chiflan las historias del sueño americano convertido en pesadilla, si me hierve la sangre con esos hijosdeputa de la América profunda, fanáticos de religión, patriotismo y violencia.
“Bone no había visto nunca tantos letreros de calles con marcas de balazos, ni siquiera en un gueto. Pero luego pensó que no había nada de anómalo en ello: si la beatería y el patriotismo tenían un compañero de cama, ese era la violencia.”En Cutter y Bone no solo sientes una irritable picazón de hostiar a toda esa basura blanca. Más de una vez (y de dos y de tres) arrojarías por la ventana a los dos protagonistas, y no solo por la de veces que les gritas ¡¡¡ no, jodido imbécil, es que no te das cuenta !!!, sino por lo despreciables que llegan a ser, por lo atractivos que nos resultan precisamente por ser tan despreciables, por hacer de su crueldad algo tan morbosamente divertido y, esto es lo más mortificante, por su jodido éxito con las mujeres, mayor cuanto peor son estas tratadas por este par de… ¿de qué?
Cutter es un personaje de esos que por sí solos justifican una historia, vástago de una familia arruinada (ningún personaje principal procede de los barrios bajos, precisamente), ha salido de Vietnam hecho un trapito físico y mental. Encolerizado con todo y con todos, incluido él mismo, vive de una mísera pensión de guerra entre sarcasmos y borracheras al lado de una hermosa mujer, a la que parece castigar y despreciar por el mero hecho de amarlo, y del hijo común del que solo es consciente cuando este le molesta con sus irritantes lloros. A este hogar feliz se acopla Bone que, ahogado en una vida de joven ejecutivo de éxito, mujer, dos hijos y casa con jardín, lo abandona todo por una vida sin rumbo ni horizonte y en la que sobrevive a costa de las mujeres que se va encontrando por el camino. Dos jodidos perdedores, mucho menos inteligentes de lo que ellos se creen, que intentan jugar una última partida con la vida apostándose el resto y sabiendo y no queriendo saber que las cartas están marcadas y ellos son los primos.
La impresión es que Newton Thornburg escribió la novela en un estado de cabreo importante (quizás esa es la razón por la que se le fuera la mano en ciertas ocasiones), asqueado de toda esa vertiente negrísima del ser humano que tan bien representa una buena parte de su país, con una mala hostia del quince hacia esas cumbres infectas a las que puede llegar este sistema y esta sociedad a poco que se la deje a su aire y sin control, y con una desesperanza mortal sobre las posibilidades del ser humano.
"La vida era brutal y fea y había que soportarla solo, y cualquier amor o belleza que se encontrara por el camino era algo puramente accidental y por lo general efímero. Nada tenía ningún valor en sí mismo. No había ningún patrón oro en la vida. La moneda corriente era el papel, un papel en continua devaluación. Por descontado. ¿Alguna novedad más?"
December 8, 2019
Cutter and Bone is a kind of mystery noir. A criminal – if one is a criminal – is well heeled… And investigators – if they are investigators – are down and out…
This is the big bad world in which all the bad things are taking place. And the story has an impenetrably gloomy atmosphere and it exudes an extremely bleak psychological aura…
Some are born to lose and some are born to win… And winner takes all.
I don’t like this motherfucker Wolfe and all the motherfuckers like him, all the movers and shakers of this world, kiddo, because I saw them too many times, and I saw the people they moved and shook. I saw the soft white motherfuckers in their civvies and flak jackets come slicking in from Long Binh to look us over out in the boonies, see that everything was going sweet and smooth, the killing and the cutting and the sewing up, and then they’d grunt and fart and squeeze their way back into their choppers and slick on back to Washington or Wall Street or Peoria and say on with the show, America, a few more bombs will do it, a few more arms and legs.
This is the big bad world in which all the bad things are taking place. And the story has an impenetrably gloomy atmosphere and it exudes an extremely bleak psychological aura…
One could spend all his life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, and nothing would change. For human beings finally were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by a centimeter the terrible precision of their journeys.
Some are born to lose and some are born to win… And winner takes all.
January 9, 2020
Could a book be described as being a really attractive read? Because that was my feeling about this novel. It is a powerful, seductive, entertaining and chaotic story about two sleazy characters. Good for nothings, that’s what Cutter and Bone are but still you cannot help feeling great patience for them, however nasty behaviour they expose on a daily basis. They are losers, but nevertheless clearly possess some conscience and style, although deeply buried.
Cutter and Bone live in pure squalor in a cluttered little house with Mo, Cutter’s girlfriend and their little boy. Their main daily occupation is finding money to eat, buy liquor and dope. Cutter gets a veteran pension for his injuries suffered in Vietnam, from which they all live and which is spent in a fortnight. Cutter is a pretty tragic guy, but he is a toughie. He lost an eye, an arm and a leg and has clearly a severe case of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, manifesting itself by a constant hassling and insulting of people in the hope of getting into a serious fight. Being obnoxious seems to give him a purpose in life. It is the daily occupation of Bone to try to prevent that the constant provoking of Cutter, wherever he goes, gets out of hand. Bone’s main income is money and meals from ladies who are glad to pay for his excellent sexual services which are enhanced by his good looks.
A murder is committed late at night and Bone happened to pass the scene of the crime, although he only realizes that the next day. This induces Cutter and Bone to pursue on a hopeless endeavour to try to profit from Bone’s vague observation. It gets them out of town and travelling into new territory, passing the highways of America through mid-Western states which are truly astonishing to see for hippies from Santa Barbara, California. An observation of Bone when staying in an Ozark village: “At the same time, Bone had never seen so many bullet-riddled street signs before, not even in a ghetto. But then he reflected that there was nothing anomalous in this: if piety and patriotism ever had a bedfellow, it was violence.”
Perhaps we can call this book a 70s noir. Vit called it a 'mystery noir' in his review. Well, we can certainly agree it has a noir feeling to it. Great story. I loved it. Wholeheartedly recommended!
Cutter and Bone live in pure squalor in a cluttered little house with Mo, Cutter’s girlfriend and their little boy. Their main daily occupation is finding money to eat, buy liquor and dope. Cutter gets a veteran pension for his injuries suffered in Vietnam, from which they all live and which is spent in a fortnight. Cutter is a pretty tragic guy, but he is a toughie. He lost an eye, an arm and a leg and has clearly a severe case of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, manifesting itself by a constant hassling and insulting of people in the hope of getting into a serious fight. Being obnoxious seems to give him a purpose in life. It is the daily occupation of Bone to try to prevent that the constant provoking of Cutter, wherever he goes, gets out of hand. Bone’s main income is money and meals from ladies who are glad to pay for his excellent sexual services which are enhanced by his good looks.
A murder is committed late at night and Bone happened to pass the scene of the crime, although he only realizes that the next day. This induces Cutter and Bone to pursue on a hopeless endeavour to try to profit from Bone’s vague observation. It gets them out of town and travelling into new territory, passing the highways of America through mid-Western states which are truly astonishing to see for hippies from Santa Barbara, California. An observation of Bone when staying in an Ozark village: “At the same time, Bone had never seen so many bullet-riddled street signs before, not even in a ghetto. But then he reflected that there was nothing anomalous in this: if piety and patriotism ever had a bedfellow, it was violence.”
Perhaps we can call this book a 70s noir. Vit called it a 'mystery noir' in his review. Well, we can certainly agree it has a noir feeling to it. Great story. I loved it. Wholeheartedly recommended!
December 21, 2015
Fate is a heck of a thing, like an answerless question. It all happened because it couldn't possibly not have happened, the proof of which is : it happened. Thriller writers are in love with fate. Things are meant to turn out in a particular way, their books seem to whisper, in order to demonstrate either moral principles (if written from the point of view of the Party of God) or to demonstrate that life is just messy like that, with wires hanging out, and no neat ends anywhere to be had not for love nor money (the Party of the Devil, aka The Anarchist Party).
In those olden days before a change of diet and too much education imbued us all with irresolution and equivocation and everyone became Hamlet all the thriller did was tell us that murder will out and the truth will set you free, some shinola like that. But things have changed. The heroes are all anti. The villains are worse than that, they're probably priests or presidents of charitable foundations or three year old babies or Pre-Raphaelite wombats.
(Dante Gabriel Rosetti's wombat)
You've seen all those movies, The Conversation, Chinatown, London to Brighton, Hard Candy, The Texas Wombat Massacre, Wombat Club, The Wombat Redemption, Bring Me The Head of Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Wombat, you're not walking away from any of those with a song in your heart and a feeling of a tough job done well, of a light somewhere still burning, of a mean street down which an unmean man has had to go and has gone. Who was that unmean man? There wasn't one. There's just mean men and even meaner men. Do I mean men? Yes, pretty much.
This is a much loved mid-1970s classic California noir novel which features two anti-heroes, one meaner than the other, but they both have fairly poor table manners, and yes, it's one of those buddy things where the straight man heroes (we know they're straight because they have so much sex with women) are full to the brim with manloving manbanter and go around talking to each other over the heads of women and passing the women between each other like they were practicing American football, and tickling each other's beards and whatall.
One character, Cutter, has what the other calls a "carapace of raillery" around him, and he really does, nothing he says in the whole 300 pages, and he never stops talking, isn't insolent, nasty, sneering, belittling and louchely ill-tempered. So why naturally that's how he gets all the women! He just snaps his missing fingers and they all fall into his arm. He's a monument of melancholy macho, as well, having left half his body in Vietnam.
But I digress. Was that digressing? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
If you took out all the mentions of alcoholic consumption this book would be one third shorter.
And there are numerous examples of drunk driving too. This is not explicitly disapproved of by the author, so I feel this book sets a very poor example for the young generation.
Therefore I have to deduct one star from its rating. That and the fact that it was only so so.
So so so is not good enough these days, given that I have only a finite number of books I can read before the grave opens its grisly maw and consumes entirely the thing known as P Bryant.
In those olden days before a change of diet and too much education imbued us all with irresolution and equivocation and everyone became Hamlet all the thriller did was tell us that murder will out and the truth will set you free, some shinola like that. But things have changed. The heroes are all anti. The villains are worse than that, they're probably priests or presidents of charitable foundations or three year old babies or Pre-Raphaelite wombats.
(Dante Gabriel Rosetti's wombat)
You've seen all those movies, The Conversation, Chinatown, London to Brighton, Hard Candy, The Texas Wombat Massacre, Wombat Club, The Wombat Redemption, Bring Me The Head of Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Wombat, you're not walking away from any of those with a song in your heart and a feeling of a tough job done well, of a light somewhere still burning, of a mean street down which an unmean man has had to go and has gone. Who was that unmean man? There wasn't one. There's just mean men and even meaner men. Do I mean men? Yes, pretty much.
This is a much loved mid-1970s classic California noir novel which features two anti-heroes, one meaner than the other, but they both have fairly poor table manners, and yes, it's one of those buddy things where the straight man heroes (we know they're straight because they have so much sex with women) are full to the brim with manloving manbanter and go around talking to each other over the heads of women and passing the women between each other like they were practicing American football, and tickling each other's beards and whatall.
One character, Cutter, has what the other calls a "carapace of raillery" around him, and he really does, nothing he says in the whole 300 pages, and he never stops talking, isn't insolent, nasty, sneering, belittling and louchely ill-tempered. So why naturally that's how he gets all the women! He just snaps his missing fingers and they all fall into his arm. He's a monument of melancholy macho, as well, having left half his body in Vietnam.
But I digress. Was that digressing? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
If you took out all the mentions of alcoholic consumption this book would be one third shorter.
And there are numerous examples of drunk driving too. This is not explicitly disapproved of by the author, so I feel this book sets a very poor example for the young generation.
Therefore I have to deduct one star from its rating. That and the fact that it was only so so.
So so so is not good enough these days, given that I have only a finite number of books I can read before the grave opens its grisly maw and consumes entirely the thing known as P Bryant.
August 12, 2015
Edit: Just found out that ALL of Newton Thornburg's work was finally released as inexpensive ebooks this year! Check em out on Kindle here for $3 each! He was an important writer and should be rediscovered. Can't wait to jump into more of his work as well.
There is a mystery at the center of this novel. But Cutter and Bone is less of a whodunit and more of a melancholy look at post-Vietnam disillusionment and weariness. The story follows two best friends who couldn't be any more different: Richard Bone, who abandoned his wife, children, and corporate job to live a dead-end life as a man-whore, mooching off of lonely women, and Alex Cutter, a severely wounded Vietnam vet, who seems desperate not to let anyone close to him. After Bone tells him that he might have witnessed a rich tycoon murder a teenage girl, Cutter becomes obsessed with it and dedicated to the idea of blackmailing him.
The truth of whether or not the tycoon really did commit the crime becomes almost completely unimportant, as is any kind of quest for justice. What becomes significant for the main characters is that the blackmail scheme gives some purpose to their dead-end lives, and for Cutter, it gives him a chance to strike back against what he sees as a symbol for all of the crap that has happened in his life.
It's a really well-written novel about desperate characters searching for significance.
There is a mystery at the center of this novel. But Cutter and Bone is less of a whodunit and more of a melancholy look at post-Vietnam disillusionment and weariness. The story follows two best friends who couldn't be any more different: Richard Bone, who abandoned his wife, children, and corporate job to live a dead-end life as a man-whore, mooching off of lonely women, and Alex Cutter, a severely wounded Vietnam vet, who seems desperate not to let anyone close to him. After Bone tells him that he might have witnessed a rich tycoon murder a teenage girl, Cutter becomes obsessed with it and dedicated to the idea of blackmailing him.
The truth of whether or not the tycoon really did commit the crime becomes almost completely unimportant, as is any kind of quest for justice. What becomes significant for the main characters is that the blackmail scheme gives some purpose to their dead-end lives, and for Cutter, it gives him a chance to strike back against what he sees as a symbol for all of the crap that has happened in his life.
It's a really well-written novel about desperate characters searching for significance.
April 14, 2019
4.75; a masterpiece of despair, disillusionment, and mounting dread, American-style. It feels ironically appropriate that I finished it on the 4th of July.
March 18, 2021
"It was not the first time Richard Bone had shaved with a Lady Remington, nor did he expect it to be the last. Nevertheless he felt a distinct breath of revulsion as he drew the instrument back and forth above his mouth, and he was not sure whether this was because he detected on it some slight residue of female armpit musk or whether the problem was simply his image in the mirror, old Golden Boy all tanned and sleek and fit."
The first lines of Cutter and Bone. A start that is racy yet downbeat. Not many writers can pull this off.
Richard Bone has left behind the 9 to 5 grind, his wife and his kids. He is barely surviving in Santa Barbara, being kept by depressed women on vacations. Spiritual support is provided by Alex Cutter, a raging crippled Vietnam war veteran turned hippie. Bone is in a mating dance with Cutter's wife Mo who is sipping alcohol and chain smoking cigarettes while taking care of their baby. The three of them live together in a rickety wood deck with a great view of California. It is a sordid setting that Thornburg paints with a lot of attention to detail about California and inner life of the main character Richard Bone. Yes, Thornburg is that rare brilliant writer who rejected the elitist cabal that is literary fiction and ventured into the unhailed waters of crime fiction, where the only certainty seems to be obscurity. Ask Charles Willeford and Charles Williams.
Bone witnesses the dumping of the raped and violated body of a teenager. He gets a glimpse of the man who does the dumping. The photograph of a chicken farm tycoon in a newspaper rings a bell and Bone thinks he has found the rapist and murderer. Bone, Cutter and the teenager's sister hatch a plan to blackmail and trap the chicken farm tycoon. They convince themselves and each other that it is not just about the money. But they really want justice for the violated teenager.
Cutter's character is very interesting because he was one of the old rich who has now been displaced by the new rich - "they went past the apartment building that once had been Cutter’s home, a huge three-story white stone structure sitting back amid the surviving palms and sycamores, its sprawling lawn all asphalt and parking places now, its porte cochere glassed in and modernized, a lobby. Behind the house rising young stockbrokers and communications specialists lived the chic life in converted stables and servants’ quarters and drank mai-tais around the same pool where Cutter’s mother, drunk, had fallen in and drowned a few years after his father."
Cutter is a bitter man. I got the feeling that a lot of his cynical commentary on modern life and his hatching of the plan to recover the money from the chicken farm tycoon was him, the displaced old rich, using the underdogs (the dead teenager and her sister) to settle scores with the new rich. Bone himself was in marketing paper products before giving it all up. Their quest for justice seems uninspired from the start and their subsequent actions confirm this.
Cutter talking about the state of his mind to Bone:
"It doesn’t change the fact that I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead.”
If you are in your forties like I am, this novel will break your heart. Thanks to my goodreads friend Hoffka for taking me to the empty bar and introducing me to the forgotten Newton Thornburg. After a point, the nihilism of Cutter and Bone begin to grate on you. They are like the relatives or friends whom you left behind because you knew they were bad for you. But when the book is over, you begin to miss the duo.
"It was just life, that was all it was, always just life, the inability of people to do what they wanted, have what they wanted. Always something else would enter the picture, some need or condition or commitment, some complicating factor that democratically robbed the rich and poor alike, robbed them of fulfillment."
The first lines of Cutter and Bone. A start that is racy yet downbeat. Not many writers can pull this off.
Richard Bone has left behind the 9 to 5 grind, his wife and his kids. He is barely surviving in Santa Barbara, being kept by depressed women on vacations. Spiritual support is provided by Alex Cutter, a raging crippled Vietnam war veteran turned hippie. Bone is in a mating dance with Cutter's wife Mo who is sipping alcohol and chain smoking cigarettes while taking care of their baby. The three of them live together in a rickety wood deck with a great view of California. It is a sordid setting that Thornburg paints with a lot of attention to detail about California and inner life of the main character Richard Bone. Yes, Thornburg is that rare brilliant writer who rejected the elitist cabal that is literary fiction and ventured into the unhailed waters of crime fiction, where the only certainty seems to be obscurity. Ask Charles Willeford and Charles Williams.
Bone witnesses the dumping of the raped and violated body of a teenager. He gets a glimpse of the man who does the dumping. The photograph of a chicken farm tycoon in a newspaper rings a bell and Bone thinks he has found the rapist and murderer. Bone, Cutter and the teenager's sister hatch a plan to blackmail and trap the chicken farm tycoon. They convince themselves and each other that it is not just about the money. But they really want justice for the violated teenager.
Cutter's character is very interesting because he was one of the old rich who has now been displaced by the new rich - "they went past the apartment building that once had been Cutter’s home, a huge three-story white stone structure sitting back amid the surviving palms and sycamores, its sprawling lawn all asphalt and parking places now, its porte cochere glassed in and modernized, a lobby. Behind the house rising young stockbrokers and communications specialists lived the chic life in converted stables and servants’ quarters and drank mai-tais around the same pool where Cutter’s mother, drunk, had fallen in and drowned a few years after his father."
Cutter is a bitter man. I got the feeling that a lot of his cynical commentary on modern life and his hatching of the plan to recover the money from the chicken farm tycoon was him, the displaced old rich, using the underdogs (the dead teenager and her sister) to settle scores with the new rich. Bone himself was in marketing paper products before giving it all up. Their quest for justice seems uninspired from the start and their subsequent actions confirm this.
Cutter talking about the state of his mind to Bone:
"It doesn’t change the fact that I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead.”
If you are in your forties like I am, this novel will break your heart. Thanks to my goodreads friend Hoffka for taking me to the empty bar and introducing me to the forgotten Newton Thornburg. After a point, the nihilism of Cutter and Bone begin to grate on you. They are like the relatives or friends whom you left behind because you knew they were bad for you. But when the book is over, you begin to miss the duo.
"It was just life, that was all it was, always just life, the inability of people to do what they wanted, have what they wanted. Always something else would enter the picture, some need or condition or commitment, some complicating factor that democratically robbed the rich and poor alike, robbed them of fulfillment."
August 11, 2022
I reckon I would’ve finished this sooner if I hadn’t spent the last two days on a sick drinking spree of fruit flavored malted hops/pseudo-beer and playing & replaying the jingle for the 1-877-Kars-4-Kids commercial.
Catchy number, that.
I dimly recalled the film version of this soul-scarring novel. Dramatic climax or resolution but not this soul-scarring. Not this psyche shattering.
Oh, 50 pages out from the last page, we’re full of bravado & derring-do but then Cousin Joe Biden fist-bumps the psycho Saudi Prince and we’re no longer sure of our footing.
This is one of the greatest post-Vietnam War noirs ever published.
Jesus God. Lines like:
…all equally adorned with decals celebrating God and Country: America-Love It Or Leave It; My God Is Alive - Sorry About Yours; What A Friend We Have In Jesus.
At the same time, Bone had never seen so many bullet-riddled street signs before, not even in a ghetto. But then he reflected that there was nothing anomalous in this: if piety and patriotism ever had a bedfellow, it was violence.
You share the lives of the disturbed and the disturbing in this novel. Our compadres, Bone… the Golden Sunshine Boy from the jungles of the Milwaukee advertising wars turned gigolo and Cutter… one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed psycho-Viet vet looking to do just one good deed before he dies (to quote Dylan half-assedly) and Cutter’s poor quaalude addicted poor little rich girl Mo fallen from her comfortable perch as Society’s child-mother to Cutter’s baby, Alex Five, and all the detritus of the failed Age of Aquarius hippie drop-outs. All wandering aimlessly through Southern California. No destination. No goals. All of them harboring deep, underground wells of despondency.
Was any of it as important as the sleep Bone was missing right now or a good breakfast in the morning or the prospect of sun and sand within a few days, with perhaps an occasional lay to keep the plumbing open, the nerves all fat and sleek?
Not hardly.
Because nothing he did here and now would matter. It never had and never would. One could spend all his life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, and nothing would change. For human beings finally were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by a centimeter the terrible precision of their journeys.
Just don’t whine to me about how you never saw the ending barreling at you.
Newton Thornburg is one of the greatest authors I’ve ever read. Up there with Boston Teran, Jim Nisbet, or Kem Nunn.
Just found this obit in The Guardian:
https://t.co/UsKtTAsgxk
Catchy number, that.
I dimly recalled the film version of this soul-scarring novel. Dramatic climax or resolution but not this soul-scarring. Not this psyche shattering.
Oh, 50 pages out from the last page, we’re full of bravado & derring-do but then Cousin Joe Biden fist-bumps the psycho Saudi Prince and we’re no longer sure of our footing.
This is one of the greatest post-Vietnam War noirs ever published.
Jesus God. Lines like:
…all equally adorned with decals celebrating God and Country: America-Love It Or Leave It; My God Is Alive - Sorry About Yours; What A Friend We Have In Jesus.
At the same time, Bone had never seen so many bullet-riddled street signs before, not even in a ghetto. But then he reflected that there was nothing anomalous in this: if piety and patriotism ever had a bedfellow, it was violence.
You share the lives of the disturbed and the disturbing in this novel. Our compadres, Bone… the Golden Sunshine Boy from the jungles of the Milwaukee advertising wars turned gigolo and Cutter… one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed psycho-Viet vet looking to do just one good deed before he dies (to quote Dylan half-assedly) and Cutter’s poor quaalude addicted poor little rich girl Mo fallen from her comfortable perch as Society’s child-mother to Cutter’s baby, Alex Five, and all the detritus of the failed Age of Aquarius hippie drop-outs. All wandering aimlessly through Southern California. No destination. No goals. All of them harboring deep, underground wells of despondency.
Was any of it as important as the sleep Bone was missing right now or a good breakfast in the morning or the prospect of sun and sand within a few days, with perhaps an occasional lay to keep the plumbing open, the nerves all fat and sleek?
Not hardly.
Because nothing he did here and now would matter. It never had and never would. One could spend all his life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, and nothing would change. For human beings finally were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by a centimeter the terrible precision of their journeys.
Just don’t whine to me about how you never saw the ending barreling at you.
Newton Thornburg is one of the greatest authors I’ve ever read. Up there with Boston Teran, Jim Nisbet, or Kem Nunn.
Just found this obit in The Guardian:
https://t.co/UsKtTAsgxk
July 14, 2022
Cutter and Bone, like Thornburg's Dreamland, is a story that on its surface is about murder and conspiracy, but is more about the twisted characters in it than it about the crime story. Both this book and Dreamland involve amateurs who are rootless drifters trying to solve a mystery. But Cutter and Bone is the R-rated version, involving not just rootless but decent characters trying to do good in a crazy world, but essentially nihilistic worthless cancers on society's backside.
Cutter and Bone is Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing meets murder mystery. It's a long strange trip involving two cynical men with no jobs, no real connections, and both half mad. One is an unrepentant gigolo living off any woman he can hypnotize or crashing in his buddy's pad. He once walked away from a middle management job, a wife, and kids. The other survived Vietnam with one less eye and one bloody stump of an arm.
Witnessing the dumping of a teenage girl’s body is what changes their worlds. They set out to blackmail the culprit together with the victim's sister. Then, after drowning in the sea and more booze than twenty bathtubs would contain, it's a trip to the Ozarks with a college co-ed and not much of a plan.
Not your ordinary crime fiction, but a powerful study of despair, rootlessness, and losing one's mind. No one writes this stuff like Thornburg. No one
Cutter and Bone is Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing meets murder mystery. It's a long strange trip involving two cynical men with no jobs, no real connections, and both half mad. One is an unrepentant gigolo living off any woman he can hypnotize or crashing in his buddy's pad. He once walked away from a middle management job, a wife, and kids. The other survived Vietnam with one less eye and one bloody stump of an arm.
Witnessing the dumping of a teenage girl’s body is what changes their worlds. They set out to blackmail the culprit together with the victim's sister. Then, after drowning in the sea and more booze than twenty bathtubs would contain, it's a trip to the Ozarks with a college co-ed and not much of a plan.
Not your ordinary crime fiction, but a powerful study of despair, rootlessness, and losing one's mind. No one writes this stuff like Thornburg. No one
July 5, 2018
5-stars, brilliant and extraordinary. A masterpiece of tragic noir.
Alex Cutter is the greatest and most unusual anti-hero in all of noir. Wow.
From over 30 years ago, I can still see clearly in my mind, the young Jeff Bridges as sullen giggolo Bone, and John Heard as the poisonous, tragic Cutter. Reading the novel returns the deep sadness of dissipated youth and opportunity, the commercial greed of the obscene Vietnam War and the growing cancer of American jungle capitalism.
Full size image
This 1976 novel was filmed in 1981 as "Cutter's Way". The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind for ten years."
The novel starts slowly, and Cutter's abuse is hard to take. We puzzle at the relationship between Cutter, Bone and Mo throughout the first half of the book, and then ... disaster. The seeds of tragedy in each character accelerates their hurtle downhill towards their own destruction. Under Cutter's poisonous self-hatred, Bone and Mo are helpless in his slipstream. We read on, knowing the ending will be very bad, but it's worse than we could imagine.
Note: I much prefer the movie ending... Perhaps the book's ending is more realistic, more in keeping with the tragedy of the story, but it's pretty cynical and unjust, far too much "Easy Rider", far too dissipated and hopeless. It left me depressed for hours after I finished. A real kick in the teeth.
Thornburg is a master, and his prose is powerful and compelling and should be constantly depressing. However, being human, we continue to hope and invest, particularly in Bone. Thornburg knows we will, and uses this to drive us on and on to disaster. Wow.
-- Notes and quotes:
Bone is burned out already, and on the run from himself:
Christ, he hated California, or at least this coastal strip of it, this crowded stage where America kept trying out the future and promptly closing it, never letting it open for long on Main Street. And yet Bone could not bring himself to leave. It was like loving the meanest, gaudiest whore in the house. You got what you deserved.
When your mortality was that real for you, how could you spend what might be your last hours in someone else’s hire, making or selling or serving disposable junk? But now, sober, Bone had no answers, no certitude, nothing but the fear, the coldness trickling through him.
16%
Extraordinary prose from Thornburg here. Wow.
Cutter talks about being a killing machine in Vietnam:
"Not there, on the spot, not while you were doing it, it was nothing, you were a machine, nothing touched you, nothing mattered. But later—later, back here, when the My Lai thing broke—you remember those pictures in Life? The peasants? That one young woman with her old mother and her kid, and they’re all hugging each other and crying, waiting to be offed. And the next picture, there they all are in the ditch. Well back here, with time, you know, you had time to study them, those pictures. And that’s what I did. I studied them all right. I went to school at those pictures. And you know what I found out? I found out you have three reactions, Rich, only three. The first one is simple—I hate America. But then you study them some more, and you move up a notch. There is no God. But you know what you say finally, Rich, after you’ve studied them all you can? You say—I’m hungry.”
Bone considers his friend's self-destructiveness:
For he knew better than he cared to the lineaments of Cutter’s character, that his friend could no more leave the thing as it was than he could leave unopened a ticking box. But it was not avarice he feared in Alex so much as death, the recklessness unto death, the love of death that came off him like the reek of putrescent flesh.
Chapter 9 extraordinary....
Bone's grief is so exquisite and painful, so beautifully portrayed in this, and continuing in the chapter. Extraordinary.
And he thought about what he was doing, why he had to get drunk this day. He did not think it was because of his feelings of guilt and remorse, that they were insupportable. They should have been, he knew. But they were not. And he did not believe the reason was simple grief, the knowledge that she was gone now, gone forever, and the baby with her—the terrible and final knowing that he would not see her again, not talk with her, not hold her, not ever. This knowledge, this grief, had become for him an unrelieved and oddly localized pain, as if an artery in his chest had burst and was now spilling his life there. Even this he could have endured, however, could have faced it sober. He did not need the liquor for that, nor as a kind of ritual thing, part of some private memorial service, a lone man’s wake. No, he imagined that the reason for the bottle was simply that he did not care to live through the rest of this day as his customary self, his sober self, Old Faithless in the mirror. Today he needed to take his eye off the ball. He needed an unsteady hand and an unsure foot. He needed a vacation from the grubby little scavenger that was Richard Kendall Bone.
... chapter continues, ever more eloquent and sad.
Bone to Cutter...
“You know the old phrase about beating swords into plowshares—well I think you’ve beaten your grief into a sword.” .... For a span of minutes Cutter stood there staring out at the night and the river and then finally he turned and came back, and though he was grinning again, slightly, crookedly, all Bone really saw was his eye and the tears that filled it, made it seem incandescent in the starlight.
Cutter:
And again he shook his head back and forth, like an animal contemplating the bars of its cage. “You ever feel divided?” he asked finally. “I mean, like you was split, like some goddamn worm cut in two, and the two parts of you keep crawling around looking for the other, for the whole of you?”
One could spend all his life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, and nothing would change. For human beings finally were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by a centimeter the terrible precision of their journeys.
.
Alex Cutter is the greatest and most unusual anti-hero in all of noir. Wow.
From over 30 years ago, I can still see clearly in my mind, the young Jeff Bridges as sullen giggolo Bone, and John Heard as the poisonous, tragic Cutter. Reading the novel returns the deep sadness of dissipated youth and opportunity, the commercial greed of the obscene Vietnam War and the growing cancer of American jungle capitalism.
Full size image
This 1976 novel was filmed in 1981 as "Cutter's Way". The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind for ten years."
The novel starts slowly, and Cutter's abuse is hard to take. We puzzle at the relationship between Cutter, Bone and Mo throughout the first half of the book, and then ... disaster. The seeds of tragedy in each character accelerates their hurtle downhill towards their own destruction. Under Cutter's poisonous self-hatred, Bone and Mo are helpless in his slipstream. We read on, knowing the ending will be very bad, but it's worse than we could imagine.
Note: I much prefer the movie ending... Perhaps the book's ending is more realistic, more in keeping with the tragedy of the story, but it's pretty cynical and unjust, far too much "Easy Rider", far too dissipated and hopeless. It left me depressed for hours after I finished. A real kick in the teeth.
Thornburg is a master, and his prose is powerful and compelling and should be constantly depressing. However, being human, we continue to hope and invest, particularly in Bone. Thornburg knows we will, and uses this to drive us on and on to disaster. Wow.
-- Notes and quotes:
Bone is burned out already, and on the run from himself:
Christ, he hated California, or at least this coastal strip of it, this crowded stage where America kept trying out the future and promptly closing it, never letting it open for long on Main Street. And yet Bone could not bring himself to leave. It was like loving the meanest, gaudiest whore in the house. You got what you deserved.
When your mortality was that real for you, how could you spend what might be your last hours in someone else’s hire, making or selling or serving disposable junk? But now, sober, Bone had no answers, no certitude, nothing but the fear, the coldness trickling through him.
16%
Extraordinary prose from Thornburg here. Wow.
Cutter talks about being a killing machine in Vietnam:
"Not there, on the spot, not while you were doing it, it was nothing, you were a machine, nothing touched you, nothing mattered. But later—later, back here, when the My Lai thing broke—you remember those pictures in Life? The peasants? That one young woman with her old mother and her kid, and they’re all hugging each other and crying, waiting to be offed. And the next picture, there they all are in the ditch. Well back here, with time, you know, you had time to study them, those pictures. And that’s what I did. I studied them all right. I went to school at those pictures. And you know what I found out? I found out you have three reactions, Rich, only three. The first one is simple—I hate America. But then you study them some more, and you move up a notch. There is no God. But you know what you say finally, Rich, after you’ve studied them all you can? You say—I’m hungry.”
Bone considers his friend's self-destructiveness:
For he knew better than he cared to the lineaments of Cutter’s character, that his friend could no more leave the thing as it was than he could leave unopened a ticking box. But it was not avarice he feared in Alex so much as death, the recklessness unto death, the love of death that came off him like the reek of putrescent flesh.
Chapter 9 extraordinary....
Bone's grief is so exquisite and painful, so beautifully portrayed in this, and continuing in the chapter. Extraordinary.
And he thought about what he was doing, why he had to get drunk this day. He did not think it was because of his feelings of guilt and remorse, that they were insupportable. They should have been, he knew. But they were not. And he did not believe the reason was simple grief, the knowledge that she was gone now, gone forever, and the baby with her—the terrible and final knowing that he would not see her again, not talk with her, not hold her, not ever. This knowledge, this grief, had become for him an unrelieved and oddly localized pain, as if an artery in his chest had burst and was now spilling his life there. Even this he could have endured, however, could have faced it sober. He did not need the liquor for that, nor as a kind of ritual thing, part of some private memorial service, a lone man’s wake. No, he imagined that the reason for the bottle was simply that he did not care to live through the rest of this day as his customary self, his sober self, Old Faithless in the mirror. Today he needed to take his eye off the ball. He needed an unsteady hand and an unsure foot. He needed a vacation from the grubby little scavenger that was Richard Kendall Bone.
... chapter continues, ever more eloquent and sad.
Bone to Cutter...
“You know the old phrase about beating swords into plowshares—well I think you’ve beaten your grief into a sword.” .... For a span of minutes Cutter stood there staring out at the night and the river and then finally he turned and came back, and though he was grinning again, slightly, crookedly, all Bone really saw was his eye and the tears that filled it, made it seem incandescent in the starlight.
Cutter:
And again he shook his head back and forth, like an animal contemplating the bars of its cage. “You ever feel divided?” he asked finally. “I mean, like you was split, like some goddamn worm cut in two, and the two parts of you keep crawling around looking for the other, for the whole of you?”
One could spend all his life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, and nothing would change. For human beings finally were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by a centimeter the terrible precision of their journeys.
.
July 8, 2020
Cutter and Bone, like Thornburg's Dreamland, is a story that on its surface is about murder and conspiracy, but is more about the twisted characters in it than it about the crime story. Both this book and Dreamland involve amateurs who are rootless drifters trying to solve a mystery. But Cutter and Bone is the R-rated version, involving not just rootless but decent characters trying to do good in a crazy world, but essentially nihilistic worthless cancers on society's backside.
Cutter and Bone is Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing meets murder mystery. It's a long strange trip involving two cynical men with no jobs, no real connections, and both half mad. One is an
unrepentant gigolo living off any woman he can hypnotize or crashing in his buddy's pad. He once walked away from a middle management job, a wife, and kids. The other survived Vietnam with one less eye
and one bloody stump of an arm.
Witnessing the dumping of a teenage gir's body is what changes their worlds. They set out to blackmail the culprit together with the victim's sister. Then, after drowning in the sea of more booze than twenty bathtubs would contain, it's a trip to the Ozarks with a college co-ed and not much of a plan.
Not your ordinary crime fiction, but a powerful study of despair, rootlessness, and losing one's mind. No one writes this stuff like Thornburg. No one.
Cutter and Bone is Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing meets murder mystery. It's a long strange trip involving two cynical men with no jobs, no real connections, and both half mad. One is an
unrepentant gigolo living off any woman he can hypnotize or crashing in his buddy's pad. He once walked away from a middle management job, a wife, and kids. The other survived Vietnam with one less eye
and one bloody stump of an arm.
Witnessing the dumping of a teenage gir's body is what changes their worlds. They set out to blackmail the culprit together with the victim's sister. Then, after drowning in the sea of more booze than twenty bathtubs would contain, it's a trip to the Ozarks with a college co-ed and not much of a plan.
Not your ordinary crime fiction, but a powerful study of despair, rootlessness, and losing one's mind. No one writes this stuff like Thornburg. No one.
January 25, 2013
i am stingy with my stars, i admit it. but i read this book twice in a row on first reading, and that 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. (update jan 2013: the original owner gave me their copy. and i am reading it again now. :) 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 visceral world in words and 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 to the two men; 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.
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. (update jan 2013: the original owner gave me their copy. and i am reading it again now. :) 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 visceral world in words and 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 to the two men; 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.
December 23, 2022
Can't remember the last time a novel left me so shaken, or with an impulse to pick up the phone and just talk to someone about it. I brought this with me over the summer, on my first flight in nearly four years, and suffice to say it was the right choice. I'm sure it was partly the absence of any real distractions up there in the sky, but it was the first time in a while that I'd felt truly engrossed in a novel and its characters. Six months on, the new year approaching, and I still haven't written a good review, so I guess this will do for now. But someday soon I'm going to have to revisit the tragic tale of Cutter and Bone.
December 17, 2010
I finished this two weeks ago and I can't get it out of my head. The blunt-force terror of the abrupt ending haunts me, the characters and their miseries and their desperation and their awful milieu imprinted on my brain. Newton Thornburg's Cutter and Bone is a bleak masterpiece and I can't recommend it more highly to those of you who are predisposed to love bleak masterpieces. Anyone who doesn't love heroic bleakness, just fuck off.
The cineastes among my GR circle may have seen the 1981 film Cutter's Way, based on this novel. It is commonly cited as the swansong of the '70s paranoid-thriller genre and has become a cult favorite, not without reason. John Heard's performance as the irreparably damaged Vietnam vet Alex Cutter is so great that you will sadly wonder why his career never really went anywhere afterwards. (Biggest mistake the Sopranos writers ever made was killing off Heard's corrupt cop in season one.) But good as the movie is, it only scratches the surface of the depressing perfection of the book, and boy does it have the wrong fucking ending. So I deem the film optional and the novel absolutely essential.
The story. It's the '70s, and the zeitgeist is crawling with the traumas of Vietnam. Cutter's been home a while but he's a total mess, crippled physically and psychologically, constantly putting on a show of psycho theatrics, ranting and raving and lashing out at the world. His odd-couple buddy Richard Bone (like Marty and Doc in Back to the Future, it's never really clear how these two became friends) is a sleazy pretty-boy bum who walked out on his middle-class family life to work a gigolo racket and sponge off Cutter's meager resources. One night Bone witnesses somebody dumping a dead body in a trashcan, Cutter gets the idea it might've been this prominent tycoon, and suddenly he has something to put his energies toward besides suicide, i.e. blackmail (or whatever). From this point the guys spiral down to the bottom, not before taking some others with them. Cutter's wife Mo is the closest thing the book has to a moral voice, but of course she's a near-nihilistic junkie who neglects her kid.
Cutter's mania is terrifyingly convincing. Thornburg gives him a brief, amazing monologue related to the photos of the My Lai massacre that's gotta be one of the high-water marks of dialogue in 20th century American literature. I won't spoil it here though George Pelecanos does in his reverent intro to this edition. The prose snaps throughout, an unembellished journalistic style so unflinching it borders on sadism at times. Cutter and Bone barrel toward their destiny and Thornburg follows them. The ending is correct.
Maybe the essential post-Vietnam American novel?
The cineastes among my GR circle may have seen the 1981 film Cutter's Way, based on this novel. It is commonly cited as the swansong of the '70s paranoid-thriller genre and has become a cult favorite, not without reason. John Heard's performance as the irreparably damaged Vietnam vet Alex Cutter is so great that you will sadly wonder why his career never really went anywhere afterwards. (Biggest mistake the Sopranos writers ever made was killing off Heard's corrupt cop in season one.) But good as the movie is, it only scratches the surface of the depressing perfection of the book, and boy does it have the wrong fucking ending. So I deem the film optional and the novel absolutely essential.
The story. It's the '70s, and the zeitgeist is crawling with the traumas of Vietnam. Cutter's been home a while but he's a total mess, crippled physically and psychologically, constantly putting on a show of psycho theatrics, ranting and raving and lashing out at the world. His odd-couple buddy Richard Bone (like Marty and Doc in Back to the Future, it's never really clear how these two became friends) is a sleazy pretty-boy bum who walked out on his middle-class family life to work a gigolo racket and sponge off Cutter's meager resources. One night Bone witnesses somebody dumping a dead body in a trashcan, Cutter gets the idea it might've been this prominent tycoon, and suddenly he has something to put his energies toward besides suicide, i.e. blackmail (or whatever). From this point the guys spiral down to the bottom, not before taking some others with them. Cutter's wife Mo is the closest thing the book has to a moral voice, but of course she's a near-nihilistic junkie who neglects her kid.
Cutter's mania is terrifyingly convincing. Thornburg gives him a brief, amazing monologue related to the photos of the My Lai massacre that's gotta be one of the high-water marks of dialogue in 20th century American literature. I won't spoil it here though George Pelecanos does in his reverent intro to this edition. The prose snaps throughout, an unembellished journalistic style so unflinching it borders on sadism at times. Cutter and Bone barrel toward their destiny and Thornburg follows them. The ending is correct.
Maybe the essential post-Vietnam American novel?
August 12, 2021
“You are going to Missouri, then,” he said. “I guess so.”
This is Missouri’s bicentennial week so I figured it was kismet that Cutter and Bone popped up as a recommendation when I was searching out something gritty. Full disclosure: I was actually trying to track down some fictionalization à la David Joy style about Humboldt County, California after starting the Netflix documentary series Murder Mountain and got this instead. Also full disclosure: the lion’s share of this story takes place in the Santa Barbara area and not in Missouri.
The story here is about two fellas named Cutter and Bone (duh) and their attempt at either solving, avenging or simply shaking down the person they think may be responsible for killing a young woman and dumping her in a trash can.
There’s not a whole lot I have to say about this one. The last quarter was probably 5 Star worthy, but as a whole it was a bit of a mess. Starting with the catalyst behind the whole tracking down of business tycoon J.J. Wolfe. Not to mention I am not a fan of dialogue that tries too hard to be witty but comes off as page upon page of "dad jokes."
As I said above, I am a lover of grit lit or hick lit or whatever you want to call it. I am also a lover of unloveable characters and “buddy cop” tales and sometimes it’s perfectly fine for them to yuck it up whilst speaking like in Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series. I’m always down for a good ol’ pull at the heartstrings like the aforementioned David Joy is so good at doing. I think this simply fell victim to a “been there done that bought the t-shirt” kind of experience. Good news is it has aged well, bad news is it wasn’t exactly sure what type of story it wanted to be.
This is Missouri’s bicentennial week so I figured it was kismet that Cutter and Bone popped up as a recommendation when I was searching out something gritty. Full disclosure: I was actually trying to track down some fictionalization à la David Joy style about Humboldt County, California after starting the Netflix documentary series Murder Mountain and got this instead. Also full disclosure: the lion’s share of this story takes place in the Santa Barbara area and not in Missouri.
The story here is about two fellas named Cutter and Bone (duh) and their attempt at either solving, avenging or simply shaking down the person they think may be responsible for killing a young woman and dumping her in a trash can.
There’s not a whole lot I have to say about this one. The last quarter was probably 5 Star worthy, but as a whole it was a bit of a mess. Starting with the catalyst behind the whole tracking down of business tycoon J.J. Wolfe. Not to mention I am not a fan of dialogue that tries too hard to be witty but comes off as page upon page of "dad jokes."
As I said above, I am a lover of grit lit or hick lit or whatever you want to call it. I am also a lover of unloveable characters and “buddy cop” tales and sometimes it’s perfectly fine for them to yuck it up whilst speaking like in Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series. I’m always down for a good ol’ pull at the heartstrings like the aforementioned David Joy is so good at doing. I think this simply fell victim to a “been there done that bought the t-shirt” kind of experience. Good news is it has aged well, bad news is it wasn’t exactly sure what type of story it wanted to be.
August 10, 2020
A crime story serves here as a frame for an existential crisis. Two misfits, living precariously from day to day in California, witness the aftermath of a gruesome murder and hatch a plan to blackmail the main suspect instead of going to the police with the evidence. In true noir fashion, the bleak reality of big money and bad luck will work against the efforts of these two friends to turn their scheme into a lucrative scam.
Christ, he hated California, or at least this coastal strip of it, this crowded stage where America kept trying out the future and promptly closing it, never letting it open for long on Main Street. And yet Bone could not bring himself to leave. It was like loving the gaudiest whore in the house. You got what you deserved.
Richard Bone is a beach bum, a late arrival flower power drifter who landed in sunny California in the 70s in an attempt to escape a dreary middle class existence as a marketing executive in the Midwest. Bone is trading on his fading good looks as a gigolo for lonely women on vacation, always only a step away from homelessness. His best and only friend is a handicapped Vietnam veteran, a drunkard and a drug addict living out of his disability checks named Alex Cutter.
“Anyway I don’t figure I’m sick. I figure I’m well, one of the few. I figure I see life whole and honest, exactly as it is. And the only normal healthy response is what I have, this despair.”
Depression, despair, dejection, decay, despondency : the picture of life in the Promised Land is a far cry from the tourist trap posters of California with those sunny beaches and bikini clad, long-legged blondes. While the crime part of the plot is well plotted and decently paced, the main focus of the novel is lifting the veil from the pretty facade of the American Dream and revealing the foundation of greed, selfishness and ruthlessness of the real deal.
And of course the police and the FBI and the media – everybody believes. Because you’ve got the bread. You’ve got the power and the glory, the God-given proof of your righteousness forever and ever amen.
Money is power in this merciless jungle, and the decision of Cutter and Bone to challenge one of the leading fat cats of industry with circumstantial evidence of a crime will either put them on the fast lane to easy living, or send them down a highway to hell.
One could spend all his life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, and nothing would change. For human beings finally were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by a centimeter the terrible precision of their journeys.
>>><<<>>><<<
I’m glad I came to this powerful novel with little foreknowledge. It made the journey both memorable and heartbreaking, reminding me once again why I prefer these blood and guts ugly truth stories to the formal cosy mysteries set in high society mansions that preceded the noir canon.
Newton Thornburg climbed fast in my genre top listing, and I hope to read more from him in order to consolidate this positive first impression.
July 5, 2022
CUTTER AND BONE is a perfect novel. It's a perfect distillation of the 1970s, in its entropy, apathy and sun-drenched doubt about the failures of the 1960s and the whiff of fear about the whitewashed 1980s. It is a perfect avatar of noir, with its gorgeous hopelessness, and the gorgeous hope that squirms within it despite every reason to not exist. It is a novel of perfect prose, with one cool, dry, distant observation of acid wisdom and napalm epiphany after another. It is a novel with a perfect first line ("It was not the first time Richard Bone had shaved with a Lady Remington, nor did he expect it to be the last") and a perfect last line, and everything in between is perfect as well. There's no muddle in the middle. Every passage and every page does nothing but develop character and advance them to their individual and collective breakdowns, and in CUTTER AND BONE, character doesn't so much drive plot as character IS plot, with every twist a product of their twisted fantasies and cynical expectations. It is a novel, but it is also journalism as well, and I get the feeling Newton Thornburg knew instinctively to get out of the way of his characters and let them take him where they wanted to go, which ultimately is where they didn't want to go, because that's the way a lot of us were in the 1970s, not knowing where they, or we, or America, was headed after the failure of the revolution and the creeping ascent of Ronald Reagan and Rodney Allen Rippy and the recession of the free-range soul. As Bone reflects: "Chr*st, he hated California, or at least this coastal strip of it, this crowded stage where America kept trying out the future and promptly closing it, never letting it open for long on Main Street. And yet Bone could not bring himself to leave. It was like loving the meanest, gaudiest whore in the house. You got what you deserved."
I love CUTTER AND BONE so much that I find myself defining its perfection by what it is not rather than what it is, like a glass that's half-emptiest when it's filled to the brim with cheap booze. It is a novel without a trace of self-consciousness; it refuses to make its character and situations reductive for the consumption of a mass audience (and as a result, it never really found a substantively renumerative one in author Newton Thornburg's lifetime). In other words, the thing that makes it great is the thing that ensured it was a commercial failure, and what could be more noir than that? It refuses, despite its Santa Barbara settings, to stylize its noir; you won't find any bleak poetic ruminations about neon or rain or the capriciousness of beach women so common to lesser genre novels of the period. It never romanticizes its horrors even though it is romantic in its doomed flickers of nearly psychotic optimism; Alex Cutter will never start living again; and Richard Bone will never escape the drift of his drift, because that's what they've decided for themselves, and there are no gods in this machine to change them. It is a novel that passionately cares even as it doesn't care whether you care.
I love CUTTER AND BONE so much that I find myself defining its perfection by what it is not rather than what it is, like a glass that's half-emptiest when it's filled to the brim with cheap booze. It is a novel without a trace of self-consciousness; it refuses to make its character and situations reductive for the consumption of a mass audience (and as a result, it never really found a substantively renumerative one in author Newton Thornburg's lifetime). In other words, the thing that makes it great is the thing that ensured it was a commercial failure, and what could be more noir than that? It refuses, despite its Santa Barbara settings, to stylize its noir; you won't find any bleak poetic ruminations about neon or rain or the capriciousness of beach women so common to lesser genre novels of the period. It never romanticizes its horrors even though it is romantic in its doomed flickers of nearly psychotic optimism; Alex Cutter will never start living again; and Richard Bone will never escape the drift of his drift, because that's what they've decided for themselves, and there are no gods in this machine to change them. It is a novel that passionately cares even as it doesn't care whether you care.
January 10, 2013
A rather good thriller come buddy novel come "road movie" come description of a descent into despair. Difficult to rate because in patches it was brilliant and in patches very much not; with a strong streak of nihilism running through the middle.
The novel centres on two friends and is set in the mid 1970s.Alex Cutter is a Vietnam veteran who is emotionally and physically scarred; missing part of two limbs and one eye; he is the driving force in the book sometimes malevolent, sometimes tender and touching; mostly out of control. His friend Richard Bone has dropped out of middle class ad man life and now pretty much makes his living as a male gigolo and we mostly follow him through the rollercoaster that is the novel. The gist is that Bone, late one night, witnesses a a body being dumped from a car (at least he realises it was a body when he sees the news). He later sees a picture of a prominent businessman and thinks he may have been the one who dumped the body. Cutter comes up with a get rich quick plan that involves a spot of blackmail.
The crime and the blackmail are the backdrop for the friendship between Cutter and Bone and for Cutter's downward spiral into despair and madness. There is a very large amount of alcohol consumed; and Thornburg describes hangovers with a vividness that can only come from experience! The attempt to make sense and profit out of the murder is shown to be as impossible as the character's attempts to make sense of their lives. There are no easy or neat solutions. The female characters seem to provide a conscience for the male ones; especially Cutter's girlfriend Mo, lost soul though she is. Bone pretty much wanders through the whole thing and at times, I think this weakens the plot and strength of the narrative.
The Vietnam War is there, but not often mentioned. Having said that the wounds inflicted on America by the war (On Cutter) are at its heart.
When Cutter (reluctantly) does talk about the war, he talks about the My Lai massacre and the infamous pictures
"I studied them all right. I went to school at those pictures. And you know what I found out? I found out you have three reactions, Rich,only three. The first one is simple - I hate America. But then you study them some more and you move up a notch. There is no God. Butyou know what you finally say, Rich, after you've studied them all you can? You say - I'm hungry."
This is powerfully good writing; but only in parts. The ending, especially the last sentence is also very powerful; in a more coventional thriller type way.
Brilliant at times; the redneck town at the end is in sharp contrast with Cutter's increasingly manic and reckless decline; juxtaposing two very different Americas.
The novel centres on two friends and is set in the mid 1970s.Alex Cutter is a Vietnam veteran who is emotionally and physically scarred; missing part of two limbs and one eye; he is the driving force in the book sometimes malevolent, sometimes tender and touching; mostly out of control. His friend Richard Bone has dropped out of middle class ad man life and now pretty much makes his living as a male gigolo and we mostly follow him through the rollercoaster that is the novel. The gist is that Bone, late one night, witnesses a a body being dumped from a car (at least he realises it was a body when he sees the news). He later sees a picture of a prominent businessman and thinks he may have been the one who dumped the body. Cutter comes up with a get rich quick plan that involves a spot of blackmail.
The crime and the blackmail are the backdrop for the friendship between Cutter and Bone and for Cutter's downward spiral into despair and madness. There is a very large amount of alcohol consumed; and Thornburg describes hangovers with a vividness that can only come from experience! The attempt to make sense and profit out of the murder is shown to be as impossible as the character's attempts to make sense of their lives. There are no easy or neat solutions. The female characters seem to provide a conscience for the male ones; especially Cutter's girlfriend Mo, lost soul though she is. Bone pretty much wanders through the whole thing and at times, I think this weakens the plot and strength of the narrative.
The Vietnam War is there, but not often mentioned. Having said that the wounds inflicted on America by the war (On Cutter) are at its heart.
When Cutter (reluctantly) does talk about the war, he talks about the My Lai massacre and the infamous pictures
"I studied them all right. I went to school at those pictures. And you know what I found out? I found out you have three reactions, Rich,only three. The first one is simple - I hate America. But then you study them some more and you move up a notch. There is no God. Butyou know what you finally say, Rich, after you've studied them all you can? You say - I'm hungry."
This is powerfully good writing; but only in parts. The ending, especially the last sentence is also very powerful; in a more coventional thriller type way.
Brilliant at times; the redneck town at the end is in sharp contrast with Cutter's increasingly manic and reckless decline; juxtaposing two very different Americas.
September 24, 2021
No idea why I’m lately enamored of post Vietnam/Watergate/hippie malaise vibe but I am, and CUTTER & BONE is one of the greats of that era. Bitter, philosophical, gloomy, downbeat, exhausting. I’ve been meaning to read it for years and it was exactly everything I’d hoped! Sure it’s a book of its time so some stuff doesn’t really scan today, but *shrugs* if I cared about that I’d read books written today. Cutter and Bone are two “great” characters but awful humans. Thornburg writes with power and muscle and some sensitivity. Sure the second half reads a bit too On the Road/Fear & Loathing/Easy Rider—entirely left out of the 1981 movie adaptation (perfectly cast btw)—but it really worked like gangbusters for me. Also: one of the greatest drinking books ever. “If piety and patriotism ever had a bedfellow, it was violence.”
June 3, 2019
Quiet simply - an Outstanding read and I highly recommend. Yes, there is a crime and a mystery, but oh so much more to savor due to Thornburg's expertise. Previous Reviewers have nailed it down. Now I will find the movie, Cutter's Way.
June 27, 2019
Cutter shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not the goddamn eye, or the arm and the leg—some list, huh? They don’t help, Christ knows. But they’re not it, not the real problem. No, that’s in here,” he said, tapping his head. “And I can’t fix it. Can’t change it.”
“What is it?”
Cutter flipped him a look, spare, flat. “Well, it goes kinda like this—you make me ill, Rich. I mean physically ill, a feeling like having to puke all the time, like having the goddamn flu or a hangover. You get the picture. And it isn’t just what you say or what you do. It’s what you are, what I know you are, inside.” He must have seen some of the resentment Bone was beginning to feel, for he raised his hand, signaling that there was more to come. “And the problem, kid, the big problem is you’re the best. Yeah, I guess I probably like you best—or despise you the least, I guess I should say. Less than all the others, less even than me. Probably just a matter of style, the low key, nothing important. It doesn’t change the fact that I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead.”
“What is it?”
Cutter flipped him a look, spare, flat. “Well, it goes kinda like this—you make me ill, Rich. I mean physically ill, a feeling like having to puke all the time, like having the goddamn flu or a hangover. You get the picture. And it isn’t just what you say or what you do. It’s what you are, what I know you are, inside.” He must have seen some of the resentment Bone was beginning to feel, for he raised his hand, signaling that there was more to come. “And the problem, kid, the big problem is you’re the best. Yeah, I guess I probably like you best—or despise you the least, I guess I should say. Less than all the others, less even than me. Probably just a matter of style, the low key, nothing important. It doesn’t change the fact that I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead.”
January 21, 2009
Possibly my favourite noir novel. This one manages to grab onto a weird brand of post-vietnam American malaise, which brings an extra dimension to the unfolding crime drama.
September 24, 2016
(4.5 sterren)
Typ Newton Thornburg in op Google, en je komt terecht bij allerlei artikels (deze bijvoorbeeld: link) die de onterechte huidige onbekendheid van deze auteur aanklagen. Ik kan kort zijn: ze hebben gelijk.
Om te beginnen schrijft Thornburg fantastisch. Niet ontzettend literair, al vallen er geregeld mooie zinnen te rapen, maar vooral erg vlot en vloeiend zonder simpel te zijn. Zijn sterkste punt is echter zijn karakteruitwerking. Cutter en Bone zijn zo goed uitgewerkt dat dit geen thriller of politieroman is (wat het met het uitgangspunt "man is ooggetuige van het dumpen van een lijk" zou moeten zijn), maar echt een psychologische roman. Je wordt meegezogen in de waanzin van de Vietnam-getraumatiseerde Cutter, want als dit boek boven alles iets is, dan wel een post-Vietnamboek.
En dan zwijg ik nog over het einde: donker en grimmig, dat ongetwijfeld nog lang in mijn hoofd zal blijven hangen.
Sinds enkele jaren zijn de boeken van Newton Thornburg terug (enkel) beschikbaar als goedkope e-books. Als de rest van zijn oeuvre zo goed is als dit boek, kan ik alleen maar zeggen: lezen die handel.
But it was not his fault, he told himself. Nor hers either. It was just life, that was all it was, always just life, the inability of people to do what they wanted, have what they wanted. Always something else would enter the picture, some need or condition or commitment, some complicating factor that democratically robbed the rich and poor alike, robbed them of fulfillment.
Typ Newton Thornburg in op Google, en je komt terecht bij allerlei artikels (deze bijvoorbeeld: link) die de onterechte huidige onbekendheid van deze auteur aanklagen. Ik kan kort zijn: ze hebben gelijk.
Om te beginnen schrijft Thornburg fantastisch. Niet ontzettend literair, al vallen er geregeld mooie zinnen te rapen, maar vooral erg vlot en vloeiend zonder simpel te zijn. Zijn sterkste punt is echter zijn karakteruitwerking. Cutter en Bone zijn zo goed uitgewerkt dat dit geen thriller of politieroman is (wat het met het uitgangspunt "man is ooggetuige van het dumpen van een lijk" zou moeten zijn), maar echt een psychologische roman. Je wordt meegezogen in de waanzin van de Vietnam-getraumatiseerde Cutter, want als dit boek boven alles iets is, dan wel een post-Vietnamboek.
En dan zwijg ik nog over het einde: donker en grimmig, dat ongetwijfeld nog lang in mijn hoofd zal blijven hangen.
Sinds enkele jaren zijn de boeken van Newton Thornburg terug (enkel) beschikbaar als goedkope e-books. Als de rest van zijn oeuvre zo goed is als dit boek, kan ik alleen maar zeggen: lezen die handel.
But it was not his fault, he told himself. Nor hers either. It was just life, that was all it was, always just life, the inability of people to do what they wanted, have what they wanted. Always something else would enter the picture, some need or condition or commitment, some complicating factor that democratically robbed the rich and poor alike, robbed them of fulfillment.
July 28, 2016
I'd heard a good deal about this book, which has a rep as a cult classic. It is deserved. Both of the title characters -- especially Cutter! -- are great creations. The supporting cast is full of other very enjoyable characters too. It's impressive the way the plot snakes back and forth and plays tricks with what the cast and you the reader believe is happening. Yet what I enjoyed most of all was the acid wit. Thornburg etched the whole story with wicked dialogue and description. It reminded me a bit of Joseph Heller but less antic.
At some point I need to watch the movie, which also has quite the cult reputation. A great deal has been written about it, for a so-called forgotten film.
At some point I need to watch the movie, which also has quite the cult reputation. A great deal has been written about it, for a so-called forgotten film.
April 22, 2020
Auténtica novela negra, puede que no tenga detectives tomando trabajos por unos pocos dólares, pero los personajes son losers condenados por una sociedad que los obliga a arañar una vida y las pocas alegrías que desprenden de ella, rebuscándose una estrategia para pagar la renta y beber con los amigos, ácidos, amargados, pero sobre todos fieles, a su manera.
Hace muchos libros que no me había sorprendido de esta manera un final de libro, literalmente el párrafo final: más que sorprendido, blindsided
¡Excelente!
Hace muchos libros que no me había sorprendido de esta manera un final de libro, literalmente el párrafo final: más que sorprendido, blindsided
¡Excelente!
November 24, 2021
Picked up a good bit in second half, but even so, I never warmed up much to any of the characters and didn’t much care what happened to any of them. Found it dreary at times. Well-written , but given its rep as a kind of cultural touchstone for the period, I was underwhelmed . Finished it a few years ago and just now got motivated to review it, mostly because I was tired of seeing it on my currently reading list.
Not that it matters in evaluating a book, but I do remember enjoying the movie, which I saw long before, quite a bit. Maybe my expectations were too high?
Not that it matters in evaluating a book, but I do remember enjoying the movie, which I saw long before, quite a bit. Maybe my expectations were too high?
August 24, 2019
The movie is much better. The novel wallows too much in the drunken anomie of the central trio, with too many repetitive thoughts and scenes. The film raises everyone's dignity, tightens up the relationships and geography, and smoothly keeps the plot moving.
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