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Cheap Ticket to Heaven
In his fifth novel, Cheap Ticket to Heaven, Smith opens up the prison gates and looses on the world a pair of natural-born killers that would have made Bonnie and Clyde proud. Jack and Clare are robbers, killers, and lovers. Intelligent and not unregenerate, but very deadly, they cut a bloody swath through the Midwest and South, all the while in search of some higher truths - running existential errands - they can live by and die for. What they find at the end of their journey is a vision of surpassing beauty, and subtle proof that not every criminal must follow the well-trod path to hell.
286 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 29, 2016
"Donnie stared into his eyes. Jack could see himself, tiny, like a baby mashed into the womb of the eyeball, like a fetal space traveler, hurtling through the empty incarnate miles."
Um...okay. That sample above was not necessarily an example of horrible writing. Rather, it was an example of a writer working very hard, maybe even trying too hard. If this book had the benefit of a proper editor, this could have been one of the great ones.
So. First of all, the description on goodreads is wrong.
The plot, such as it is, is intriguing: A wealthy father of a gritty dynasty of criminals offers to pay one son to kill the other son, in the hopes that it will bring some semblance of order to the family.
The plot is never fully realized, and most of the characterization is at the level of minor characters in shows like The Sopranos or Sons of Anarchy. Get an old VHS copy of Oliver Stone's 'Natural Born Killers, add a dash of Algren's 'A Walk on the Wild Side', hit the Puree button on the ol' Vegematic, and this is what you get.
The style, however, the word choice, is absolutely wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed these psycho characters, who somehow have a graduate-level degree of verbalization and introspection, run through our country's backroads like spiced prunes through an intestine.
I found myself not taking the book seriously, but I also found myself underlining multiple creative diversions by the writer on every single page. I consider that remarkable.
Um...okay. That sample above was not necessarily an example of horrible writing. Rather, it was an example of a writer working very hard, maybe even trying too hard. If this book had the benefit of a proper editor, this could have been one of the great ones.
So. First of all, the description on goodreads is wrong.
The plot, such as it is, is intriguing: A wealthy father of a gritty dynasty of criminals offers to pay one son to kill the other son, in the hopes that it will bring some semblance of order to the family.
The plot is never fully realized, and most of the characterization is at the level of minor characters in shows like The Sopranos or Sons of Anarchy. Get an old VHS copy of Oliver Stone's 'Natural Born Killers, add a dash of Algren's 'A Walk on the Wild Side', hit the Puree button on the ol' Vegematic, and this is what you get.
The style, however, the word choice, is absolutely wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed these psycho characters, who somehow have a graduate-level degree of verbalization and introspection, run through our country's backroads like spiced prunes through an intestine.
I found myself not taking the book seriously, but I also found myself underlining multiple creative diversions by the writer on every single page. I consider that remarkable.
May 18, 2020
I really liked this book. I can't claim for sure to understand what the author was getting at, or know whether or not he resolved his protagonist's intangible crisis (whatever that was), but for me the puzzle of trying to expand my mind enough to absorb them at face value was worth the entertainment of the attempt anyway. And to be honest, the final scene was horrific enough on its physical face that I was just relieved Smith gave us a resolution to that.
I normally dislike excessively violent books, and I even-more dislike books in which the author seems perversely determined to make their main character(s) as unpleasant as possible, and then stick them with some human-condition type struggle I'm expected to care about. It's bigger gymnastics than I feel willing or able to do, and normally I perceive it as a kind of smart-ass blackmail and shut down. I detested JM Coetzee's flagship novel Disgrace, for instance. So I guess in theory I ought to hate Jack Baker and his wife Clare Manigault, but I don't. I'm not sure I like them - that seems sort of irrelevant and pretentious, like pretending to think sharks or vultures are beautiful. But I'm prepared to take them both at face value and go along for their ride.
[spoiler]
The book opens with Jack and Clare robbing a bank. They then embark on a getaway that goes badly, and results in Jack being caught and sent to prison while Clare gets away. Within a short time (a year?) Clare 'rescues' him in one of the more improbable scenes. But there's a heavy suspension of disbelief needed in any case, and here's about where the real story begins so I let that one go. We'll just explain away her success and the lack of pursuit by placing the novel in the 1950's or something before there was too much organized law enforcement to get in the way of the plot.
Jack is the bad-seed product of a political mother and a 'suicide king' father. Clare is the 'princess' of a family crime dynasty. They are soulmates in amorality and have been married, partners and professional criminals together for 18 years. At the time of the novel they are in their late 30's and getting tired.
During Jack's prison time, Clare's father visits to tell him he wants Jack to hunt down Clare's illegitimate half-brother Will and kill him, in ostensible retribution for Will's having recently (and horribly) murdered the old man's other son James. He then wants Jack to somehow talk Clare into a reconciliation with him. Manigault's true motives are obscure, but Clare's main complexity as a character is her tangled allegiances to the individual members of a family she has no conventional versions of sentiment for.
I liked this about Clare. It's a theme with both her and Jack; in fact it's a theme of the novel itself: they are both sociopathic in a conventional sense, but their acceptance of one another and their loyalties to other people are somehow still absolute and somehow still interesting. [I'm contrasting this novel with JM Coetzee's flagship novel Disgrace, which I loathed unreservedly, and I can't yet explain why I'm prepared to give their emotional lives the benefit of a doubt I wasn't willing to give to Coetzee's horrible main character. It may be something as simple as: Smith doesn't seem to be trying to make any great global point, whereas Coetzee seemed determined to force a peculiarly squalid and nasty form of despair on the reader.]
Jack has no intention of following through, but Manigault has promised him a quarter of a million dollars for doing the job. So once Clare learns of that, inevitably the two of them end up at the old man's place anyway, intending to rob him of the money regardless of any family factors.
Along the way they run afoul of an old nemesis, a man called Donnie Bernardnick who once had a brief affair with Clare briefly recruiterd Jack into a business venture while they were both in prison. They are dogged off and on both by the untrustworthy Will and by a sad-sack writer called Rubens who sees them both as the Last Great Americans and wants to write the definitive book about them. And they spend a year in a nowhere small town among the straights, taking care of an old friend/associate who had a stroke while they were in his company.
[/spoiler]
Even if you hate the book you have to admire the way Smith conveys this brilliant and familiar mundanity to Jack and Clare's relationship. They rob banks like other couples might run a mom-and-pop store together, shooting people who get in their way as matter-of-factly as they might deal with suppliers bringing a new load of bread through the back. Their amorality is so extreme and so casual that there are moments that I found genuinely funny. But they're disintegrating, and neither of them knows the solution to it.
I think the real 'problem' Smith was getting at with this book is the difficulty that Jack is in. He's tired of the life but he can't find a way out of it that doesn't involve compromise, and he's not prepared to pretend that he cares or that his moral compass has shifted because it hasn't. He spends a lot of the internal-monologue parts of the book wrestling with the story of the thief on the cross. I can agree that it's all pretty inchoate, but I don't find I mind. I don't think this is the kind of book that would or could be improved by any nice tidy pithiness. Just about everything in it and about it is ambiguous. Personally, I liked that.
I normally dislike excessively violent books, and I even-more dislike books in which the author seems perversely determined to make their main character(s) as unpleasant as possible, and then stick them with some human-condition type struggle I'm expected to care about. It's bigger gymnastics than I feel willing or able to do, and normally I perceive it as a kind of smart-ass blackmail and shut down. I detested JM Coetzee's flagship novel Disgrace, for instance. So I guess in theory I ought to hate Jack Baker and his wife Clare Manigault, but I don't. I'm not sure I like them - that seems sort of irrelevant and pretentious, like pretending to think sharks or vultures are beautiful. But I'm prepared to take them both at face value and go along for their ride.
[spoiler]
The book opens with Jack and Clare robbing a bank. They then embark on a getaway that goes badly, and results in Jack being caught and sent to prison while Clare gets away. Within a short time (a year?) Clare 'rescues' him in one of the more improbable scenes. But there's a heavy suspension of disbelief needed in any case, and here's about where the real story begins so I let that one go. We'll just explain away her success and the lack of pursuit by placing the novel in the 1950's or something before there was too much organized law enforcement to get in the way of the plot.
Jack is the bad-seed product of a political mother and a 'suicide king' father. Clare is the 'princess' of a family crime dynasty. They are soulmates in amorality and have been married, partners and professional criminals together for 18 years. At the time of the novel they are in their late 30's and getting tired.
During Jack's prison time, Clare's father visits to tell him he wants Jack to hunt down Clare's illegitimate half-brother Will and kill him, in ostensible retribution for Will's having recently (and horribly) murdered the old man's other son James. He then wants Jack to somehow talk Clare into a reconciliation with him. Manigault's true motives are obscure, but Clare's main complexity as a character is her tangled allegiances to the individual members of a family she has no conventional versions of sentiment for.
I liked this about Clare. It's a theme with both her and Jack; in fact it's a theme of the novel itself: they are both sociopathic in a conventional sense, but their acceptance of one another and their loyalties to other people are somehow still absolute and somehow still interesting. [I'm contrasting this novel with JM Coetzee's flagship novel Disgrace, which I loathed unreservedly, and I can't yet explain why I'm prepared to give their emotional lives the benefit of a doubt I wasn't willing to give to Coetzee's horrible main character. It may be something as simple as: Smith doesn't seem to be trying to make any great global point, whereas Coetzee seemed determined to force a peculiarly squalid and nasty form of despair on the reader.]
Jack has no intention of following through, but Manigault has promised him a quarter of a million dollars for doing the job. So once Clare learns of that, inevitably the two of them end up at the old man's place anyway, intending to rob him of the money regardless of any family factors.
Along the way they run afoul of an old nemesis, a man called Donnie Bernardnick who once had a brief affair with Clare briefly recruiterd Jack into a business venture while they were both in prison. They are dogged off and on both by the untrustworthy Will and by a sad-sack writer called Rubens who sees them both as the Last Great Americans and wants to write the definitive book about them. And they spend a year in a nowhere small town among the straights, taking care of an old friend/associate who had a stroke while they were in his company.
[/spoiler]
Even if you hate the book you have to admire the way Smith conveys this brilliant and familiar mundanity to Jack and Clare's relationship. They rob banks like other couples might run a mom-and-pop store together, shooting people who get in their way as matter-of-factly as they might deal with suppliers bringing a new load of bread through the back. Their amorality is so extreme and so casual that there are moments that I found genuinely funny. But they're disintegrating, and neither of them knows the solution to it.
I think the real 'problem' Smith was getting at with this book is the difficulty that Jack is in. He's tired of the life but he can't find a way out of it that doesn't involve compromise, and he's not prepared to pretend that he cares or that his moral compass has shifted because it hasn't. He spends a lot of the internal-monologue parts of the book wrestling with the story of the thief on the cross. I can agree that it's all pretty inchoate, but I don't find I mind. I don't think this is the kind of book that would or could be improved by any nice tidy pithiness. Just about everything in it and about it is ambiguous. Personally, I liked that.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 13, 2021
Charlie Smith is an amazing prose and poetry writer. No one else I've read can put together so many beautiful and thought provoking images. However, this is also his greatest failing as a novelist. He literally often misses the forest for the trees.
Cheap Ticket to Heaven is essentially a 'natural born killers' style thriller embedded in poetic prose so lush and evocative as to almost become completely estranged from its actual intent.
At times, this worked amazingly. At other times, I was completely pulled out of the story by radically improbable dialogue or a long dense block of description. And while the narrative itself wasn't bad, it just didn't hold center stage. Ultimately, I kind of didn't really care what happened. As a result, this became an almost purely intellectual read of well-written prose dotted with scenes that really resonated with me, but also with scenes that felt forced. Ultimately, the plot and characters here simply didn't connect with their observations and thoughts about the world around them. Not Charlie's best, but did have some great moments:
From the hilarious: "The cub scout stared ahead like an operative resisting torture."
To the delightfully observant: "... it was only after she memorized a couple of recipes from a book in the library and passed them on as family heirlooms to Mrs. johnson Bivens, the major town gossip, that things calmed down."
To the sublime: "Clare said the color of the leaves and the wind running through them made her think of young women in new yellow dresses."
You can still do a lot worse if you like this kind of dense poetic writing.
Cheap Ticket to Heaven is essentially a 'natural born killers' style thriller embedded in poetic prose so lush and evocative as to almost become completely estranged from its actual intent.
At times, this worked amazingly. At other times, I was completely pulled out of the story by radically improbable dialogue or a long dense block of description. And while the narrative itself wasn't bad, it just didn't hold center stage. Ultimately, I kind of didn't really care what happened. As a result, this became an almost purely intellectual read of well-written prose dotted with scenes that really resonated with me, but also with scenes that felt forced. Ultimately, the plot and characters here simply didn't connect with their observations and thoughts about the world around them. Not Charlie's best, but did have some great moments:
From the hilarious: "The cub scout stared ahead like an operative resisting torture."
To the delightfully observant: "... it was only after she memorized a couple of recipes from a book in the library and passed them on as family heirlooms to Mrs. johnson Bivens, the major town gossip, that things calmed down."
To the sublime: "Clare said the color of the leaves and the wind running through them made her think of young women in new yellow dresses."
You can still do a lot worse if you like this kind of dense poetic writing.
August 23, 2016
this book had potential, but read as if it was published in the middle of editing. the story and characters existed somewhere in this mess, but it was completely unshaped and filled throughout with dropping after dropping of absolutely unnecessary type...in some cases, several consecutive pages of it. i really wanted to like this book when i started it, and that is the only reason i persisted on skimming through the last half of it. i wanted to see if the center held, underneath all that word-litter. (the answer is....well, almost.) to future readers who may find themselves in a similar spot w/ this tale, i advise skipping altogether anything in italicized typeface. beyond that, if it seems to be veering into less plot and more meandering verbiage, then it probably is, and you should skip that, as well. (as i mentioned, this at times will mean skipping several pages at once. do not fret.) the other option is to cut your losses, close the book, pop it in the recycling bin, and move on with life.
November 9, 2007
"Her breasts hung down like exhausted conspiracies." They did?
August 12, 2011
A very painful, slow and pretentious read. Nonsensical, impressed with itself, and truly boring despite it's attempts at depth.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews