Tue 6 Jan 2009
DONALD E. WESTLAKE – The Hook.
Mysterious Press, hardcover, March 2000. Paperback reprint: Warner, April 2001.
“Well, that’s true.”
“People don’t make decisions any more, the computer makes the decisions.” Wayne leaned closer. “Let me tell you what’s happening to writers.”
“Wayne,” Bryce said gently. “I am a writer.”
“You’ve made it,” Wayne told him. “You’re above the tide, this shit doesn’t affect you. It affects the mid-list guys, like me. The big chain bookstores, they’ve each got the computer, and the computer says, we took five thousand of his last book, but we only sold thirty-one hundred, so don’t order more than thirty-five hundred. So there’s thinner distribution, and you sell twenty-seven hundred, so the next time they order three thousand.”
Bryce said, “There’s only one way for that to go.”
Of course, the writer’s lot has never been a particularly happy nor profitable one. Few fields reward so meagerly in comparison for the effort and time put into a work, or so serendipitously in success, acceptance and recognition. Trite as it may sound, it’s a rough way to make a living.
And perhaps never more so than now, when corporate mergers, marketplace pressures and swift, omnipresent technological change are altering not just the business of publishing but the reason and form for the art of fiction as well. Talented writers, gifted entertainers with loyal audiences and good stories to tell, vanish or, if they have a clever and supportive agent, reinvent themselves through pseudonyms.
It’s against this unforgiving background that Donald E. Westlake has set The Hook, which begins with a chance meeting in the New York Public Library between Bryce Proctor, a successful thriller writer of Ludlumesque proportions, and Wayne Prentice, a talented journeyman who has been zeroed out, not once but twice, by that infernal computer.
Each writer is suffering in his own way: Wayne, unable to secure a contract for his latest book, is looking for teaching jobs, a move that will undoubtedly cost him his self-respect and then his marriage, while Bryce, enduring a protracted, nasty and expensive divorce, is months behind on his next book and completely devoid of ideas.
Except one.
As if pitching a book proposal to his editor, Bryce unreels the narrative hook: Wayne can’t sell a book and Bryce can’t write one. And neither one can conceive of himself as anything other than a writer. What if they were to merge their strengths, have Bryce submit Wayne’s manuscript as his own and then split Bryce’s million dollar advance fifty/fifty? Oh, there’s one other thing. Bryce’s wife has to die.
A hook, indeed. And one that buries itself deep into each man. It gives nothing away to say that the bargain is sealed, the fatal deed soon done with the inevitable and unexpected repercussions lining up to knock at each man’s door.
Far from being consumed by guilt, Wayne is instead reinvigorated creatively, establishing a new career and enjoying a new persona as a writer of high-paying magazine articles, rising to a level of success previously unimagined.
Meantime, Bryce remains stuck in neutral, leaving New York and resettling in his rural Connecticut estate, obsessing over the murder he feels he should have seen but didn’t, still unable to break his creative block except for the germ of one idea that can’t quite develop itself.
Like Burke Devore in Westlake’s 1997 classic, The Ax, Bryce and Wayne are men who have defined their identities by their work and who now find that work, and by extension their reason for being, under siege from technological, business and social change. Bryce and Wayne will take any and all steps to preserve their jobs, their identities and their lives.
Switching his narrative back and forth between them, Westlake gradually charts the shift in the balance between the two men, contrasting Wayne’s ascendancy with Bryce’s isolation, until Wayne must take steps to ensure that Bryce – and the partnership – continues to function. But, naturally, things don’t end there.
An experienced reader may correctly guess how things will turn out on the last page, but that prescience should not detract from the many pleasures contained in The Hook. As a novel of psychological suspense it is subtle and austere, disturbing in its subdued matter of fact descriptions of moral dexterity and clandestine guilt, confident in its narrative voice, agile in its accumulation of complications and plot twists.
The book gives wry glimpses into the writer’s mind, particularly the peculiar duality of the person who creates make-believe worlds as a means of living in what passes for the real world.
The Hook is also, in a quiet, dark-humored way, a grimly funny book. Westlake casts a cold eye on the current state of the publishing world, in particular the reliance on product over quality writing, the all-consuming hunt for the Next Big Thing, and the replacement of the individual craftsman with a brand name – and often does so in scenes that are simultaneously sardonic, funny and disturbing. It’s an informed view from someone who’s been in the writing business a long time.
Deceptively complex and ambitious, The Hook never loses its way as a story. And that’s to be expected. Westlake’s crafted many types of work under several different names over four decades, always entertaining his audience, always telling a good story. And one suspects that’s all he’s ever wanted to do.
If anyone can beat that damn computer…