Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 184/404 kb
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"You were right, though. The good thing about America. Everybody's in debt."
I'm sure you know by now my morbid infatuation with the fiction of Anthony Neil Smith, so no need to dwell about how awesome it is for three paragraphs. Let's just say he's to noir literature what Marco Antonio Barrera was to the heyday of Mexican boxing. Ten thousand kilotons of aggression and fury, contained within the boundaries of experience and razor-sharp technique.That said, a first novel isn't like a first album. It's training more than it is unadulterated product. Writers get better with time and unless they are Dan Brown, they don't get caught up in the celebrity trap. PSYCHOSOMATIC is more than meets the eye, as usual for Smith. While it doesn't have the timeless quality of CHOKE ON YOUR LIES or HOGDOGGIN', it carries more than a simple noir story.His characters are raw, almost to a point of parody sometimes, but Smith is a writer who loves detail. He filters them through PSYCHOSOMATIC and shows the reader their bare essence, awakening powerful emotions.
It's the story of Lydia, who happens to be limbless. She gave three thousand dollars to a washed up boxer to beat the crap out of her ex-husband Ronnie. Problem is, Ronnie died during that beating and it opens the proverbial Rabbit Hole for her. She becomes involved in the underworld and she has to use her mind more than ever to survive. She gets a new boyfriend that quickly becomes ready to die for her. She will use him to help her wipe the shady characters from her life. That includes Terry and Lancaster, two violent hoodlums that become involved with Alan, Lydia's boyfriend. Soon enough, it gets violent. But more important, soon enough it gets ugly, because that's what Anthony Neil Smith does best. Show the ugly face behind the mask. It'll boil down to a beautiful, epic final scene that sprawls over many chapters.
One reads Anthony Neil Smith for his characters. They are exuberant by their wits, their charm or just by their unflattering physique. PSYCHOSOMATIC does that very well. It has too, because the plot lies entirely on them, on the evolution of their relationships, or should I say devolution. It's very subtle and strangely unlike what Smith did in his other books. It will take the reader a little faith to stick with the program at the start, but it's a short novel and when it kicks in, it's as beautiful as Smith's prose can get. The relationship between Lydia and her boyfriend Alan is the showstopper in this novel. They are both highly damaged, missing huge parts of them. Physically for her, emotionally for him. They have a fascinating couple dynamics and the creative ways Lydia finds to make Alan do her bidding are sometimes cringe worthy and sometimes hilarious. But yeah, it's a Smith novel. I couldn't help but take it a little too seriously.
He would never hit her again. A momentary lapse, all the stress, she considered all that, but this slap was her power. It was the entire economy of their relationship until she was ready to let it drop. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a couple of months.
I would've been a little underwhelmed by PSYCHOSOMATIC if it wasn't for that airport final. I'm not going to say anything to spoil it, except it's several chapters long and that it kicked my ass. Most fiction just can't live up to its ending, but it's not the case here. More like the opposite scenario and I can't really think about a literary precedent for that, which is really cool. My completist side is very happy I've read PSYCHOSOMATIC, but if you want to get into Smith's dark, chaotic and violent world, I suggest you read CHOKE ON YOUR LIES or the Billy Lafitte Saga (which is getting a third tome sometime in 2012). Smith writes literature for reader like me, who crave an equal amount of physical and emotional violence on the same page. In that regards, PSYCHOSOMATIC is the first chapter of Anthony Neil Smith's long and chaotic chronicle of human despair.
THREE STARS