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David Foster Wallace once said in interview that the greatest character of twentieth cenury fiction was a suitcase full of money. It's a loaded thing to say and I'm sure it was meant to be cynical, but there is more to this statement than Wallace would've liked to admit. Greed is an immortal evil, but contemporary fiction turned it into a commodity: a suitcase full of money, a shipment of smack or, like in Tom Pitts' PIGGYBACK, a car trunk full of weed spiked with a cocaine cargo. Pitts' short, intense novella is a fatalistic display of how men surrendered their lives to their own greed. To that all-consuming feeling that it's never enough.
Paul lost his shipment of drugs to two of his mules. Becky and Shelly stole a trunk full of weed, unaware that the cargo was laced with a 5 kilos piggyback of cocaine. So, Paul is in trouble and turns to his friend Jimmy, an enforcer with a knack for solving difficult situations. They soon find themselves on the tail of the two girls, who brought two boys into their schemes: Jerrod and Tristan. Paul and Jimmy are also tailed by Jose, the drug lord who the shipment belonged to. PIGGYBACK is a race to the end of a dark and fateful night, where greed and brutality are going to change the lives of several people who were never supposed to meet in the first place
PIGGYBACK is a deconstruction of what I call ''the suitcase-full-of-money conundrum''. It begins with a clear, almost translucid cliché and quickly works its way to that an abstract place where characters are confronting one another and it becomes impossible to distinct who's lying, who simply ignores the truth, who's a perpetrator and who's just an unwitting accomplice to what was supposed to be an easy score. It creates a (suspended) reality of its own that would not have existed if it had followed its course.The final scene of PIGGYBACK is both Shakespearean in its ambition and inspired by Westerns. It's a bite-sized tragedy with no innocent victims.
The proverbial suitcase full of money was the main character of PIGGYBACK, as it dictated just about everything, from the pace of the action to the fate of the cast. It was an efficient little novella, but it missed a character that defined itself by something else than the object of pursuit. The storyline stops dead in its tracks and unveils the grand finale as soon as the payload has been found. I would have loved a different perspective on such a classic trope, a fresh angle, but I can't say that Tom Pitts is not tackling the issue properly in PIGGYBACK. It's a tight, intense and yet somewhat traditional story about a missing payload and how it defines people's faith once it falls off the radar. A good, quick read for your summer.