Order HUSTLE here
(also reviewed)
Order PIGGYBACK here
''This guys just wants to be pissed on. Easy money, a hundred bucks. If you're still here when I get back, we'll go back to the hotel and cop. Call it a night.''
Donny nodded. It was hard not to feel a little envious. A hundred bucks for taking a piss.. Easy money.
I like to believe I am hypersensitive to melodrama, like a vampire is hypersensitive to light. If your novel attempts to harvest my emotions without probable cause, there's a good chance I'll walk the other way and won't look back. Point is, go easy on the emotional side or make it fucking ring true. Tom Pitts' first novel HUSTLE establishes a cold distance with its own emotional content and leaves up to the reader to piece up the significance of its social commentary. It's not a novel that's easy to get into. It's going to require some effort and involvement, but the payoff is there. HUSTLE is not a novel for everybody. It's best suited for readers with a purpose.
HUSTLE begins with Donny and Big Rich, two underage dope fiends looking for a way out of the corner. Big Rich, the more ambitious of the two has a plan to film themselves performing sexual acts on one of their high profile clients and blackmail their way into a better life. What they don't know is that their client Gabriel is already being blackmailed by someone a lot more fearsome than Donny and Big Rich, a meth freak named Dustin who has a very impressive judicial wrap sheet. So the kids are unwittingly walking into a cut throat situation between a man with something to hide and a man with nothing to lose, and absolutely no one to watch their backs.
It's difficult to establish a point of comparison for the prose of Tom Pitts. He has a very particular, shapeless style that focuses on street vernacular. I guess the closest thing to Pitts, style-wise, would be Edward Bunker. Their respective fiction discuss very different things, but they read similar. Both have that raw, unadorned, almost telegraphic quality, that capacity to focus on what's real. Perhaps one of my favourite aspects of HUSTLE was these cold descriptions on the unspeakable sexual acts Big Rich and Donny had to perform to earn drug money. That unwavering, surprisingly sober outlook they had on themselves. Especially Donny. There is this amazing scene where he's asked to pleasure himself for a customer, but he cannot find anything to get horny about. Very intense in its own way.
That said, the main calling car of HUSTLE is its dynamic storytelling. Tom Pitts understands very well the mystery writing mechanics that a situation always veil a bigger, more complex and desperate one. HUSTLE begins with a common tragedy of two kids wasting away their youth and the first hundred page is rather difficult for a variety of reason going from the stern prose to the graphic depictions of a desperate lifestyle, but as the situation evolves and Tom Pitts slowly lifts the veil on his mystery, the pace ramps up and HUSTLE becomes increasingly more fun to read. The gaze-into-the-abyss social commentary is an important part of the novel, but HUSTLE never forgets to be fun either.
If you're one of these I-read-only-to-be-entertained readers, no hard feelings but HUSTLE might not be for you. It's not going to grab you right away. It's not that kind of novel, but it's fine because it's a novel that understands very well what it is : fast-paced noir loaded with social commentary. It's not an immediate pleaser, it works on your empathy skills, kind of like if it gave you an audition for the last part of the novel. Personally, I love that kind of Darwinian challenge in a novel, but not everybody reads for the same reasons than I do. HUSTLE is a novel where the cold, hard reality of the streets and epic crime fiction ride coattails to one another. It's an industrious book with ideas that requires you to work, but it's also extremely rewarding. That Tom Pitts guy has one of the most unique voices in crime fiction.