Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 313 (paperback)/Soon to be available for Kindle
I have read Hogdoggin' over twenty-four hours and I was in no hurry. When I like what I'm reading, I can take a week to read it. Ten days if the novel is particularly long. But when I LOVE what I read, it's hard to pry me off the pages. Hogdoggin' is the best novel I've read this year so far. Better than My Dark Places and American Tabloid. Even better than The Executioner's Song. Both are a different kind of good, Mailer's novel is more exhaustive and detailed, but it suffers from pacing issues that Hogdoggin' doesn't even consider bothering with. It's a study on the chaotic nature of violence and yet, it's a non-stop pedal-to-the-metal tale of good intention gone bad, really bad. It's not completely necessary to read Yellow Medicine to appreciate the savage beauty of Hogdoggin', but I recommend it. Then you can appreciate the great truth of canonical noir novels. It can only get worse.
One of the most meaningful changes that Anthony Neil Smith made for Hogdoggin' is that he switched to third person storytelling. It could've been incidental, but it's a major component of the novel's success. It's darker, has a broader scope and gives a better portrait of the nature of crime. The novel starts a few months after the event of Yellow Medicine. Billy Lafitte has disappeared and joined a biker's gang, where he became the enforcer of a demented, seven foot tall biker chief named Steel God. He grew his hair long, grew a beard and took fifty pounds of muscle, thanks to his newfound use of anabolic steroids. Billy Lafitte, the policeman is long dead. Despite his best efforts to build a new life for himself, Lafitte is cornered by his past and forced to go back to painful memories before he can go on. And the past has a name. Franklin Rome. The ex-homeland security, now FBI agent is growing obsessed with Lafitte and will use every dirty trick he knows to smoke him out of his hole. At any cost.
There are two school of thoughts regarding crime in general. There are those who find crime irresistibly cool and perceive high profile criminals as liberated minds and self-righteous heroes. Then, there are those who regard crime as pathological and "evil". They are two kind of people, sharing a similar output on criminality. To them, life is a team sport and the laws are the rule book. Hogdoggin' walks a fine line in-between those two polarized perception of this man-made concept and does is spectacularly. Violence breeds violence, that most people will agree, but any kind of violence will bring a subject (here, Lafitte) to make pressed, dangerous choices, that will bring other criminals in the equation. Scavengers and opportunists. Then, these new variables will make the initiator of all that madness (Rome) take different decisions and rush to finish the task. It's a wheel that keeps going faster and faster. When you surround yourself with bad people, bad things happen and you should be ready to live that lifestyle all the way. While Hogdoggin' is over-the-top and sometimes very funny, there's a Damocles sword hanging over the character's head and makes their actions tainted with a stunning despair.
The supporting cast of Hogdoggin' gives it a supplementary coat of varnish that makes it shine even brighter. Desiree, Franklin Rome's estranged wife starts as a weird antagonist to the antagonist, but evolves throughout the novel to become one of the most interesting characters. I cannot speak for the writer here, but she seems to be the kind of character that took a life of her own while being written. She's discovers a good deal of her inner strength, in a twisted, parallel subplot that makes way too much sense. Steel God is quite the unique creation and and starts the novel with one of the most memorable first chapters I've read in a while. And then there's McKeown, Colleen, Fawn, Perry and even Ginny Lafitte, who plays a bigger role than in the previous novel. It's still barely a cameo, but she almost steals the show from Desiree. When you hurt a lot of people to conform to the lifestyle you chose, it's the life of everybody that knew them you toss upside down. Hogdoggin' does a great job at illustrating that, with brevity and haunting images.
The challenge of writing a crime/mystery/noir novel is to show accurately the narcissistic nature of mankind. It's the self-preservation/self-improvement/self everything, that makes someone try to step over somebody else's head. It also spreads like a virus and soon enough, everybody feels alienated, angry and are prone to destruction on a wide scale. Hogdoggin' perfectly embodies that. It's a perfect object, frozen in time. I mean, it's not the proverbial novel that will give you a Stendhal syndrome episode with its insightful and poetic prose, but it's perfect for what it is. Like The Wire was perfect for television or like Mystic River was perfect when it came out. I've never read something that had such a human approach to crime and yet, manage to keep an unbelievable pace. Yellow Medicine was great, but Hogdoggin' has the lasting power of the greatest crime novels. It's not going to attract every reader, but if you can appreciate any sort of crime novel, Hogdoggin' blow your expectations away, like you have been sitting on a TNT charge. And smile, it's coming for Kindle in June for ninety-nine cents.