Thu 7 Feb 2019
IRWIN SHAW – Nightwork. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1975. Dell, paperback, 1976. Further reprint editions exist.
Doug Grimes is a pilot with a stutter and not much of a future when he discovers he has a rare eye disease that won’t blind him, but certainly grounds him. Now he works as night man at the St. Augustine hotel, a dangerous enough job, but at thirty-three, though fit and smart, Doug Grimes is headed nowhere fast.
Men at crisis, any sort of crisis, middle age, ennui, marriage, family, divorce, business, are the stuff of many books and stories by Irwin Shaw, the bestselling story teller whose fiction from The Young Lions to Rich Man Poor Man chronicled life in the latter half of the 20th Century, primarily for the male half of the population in novels like Two Weeks In Another Town, Evening in Byzantium, Top of the Hill, and gem perfect stories like “Tip on a Dead Jockey†— and those are just some of the ones made into movies.
Few writers did it half as well as Shaw, with half the grace or style, and because his stories covered the whole of life, once in a while crime played into that. In Nightwork he chose to do something a bit lighter and more playful, and it should come as no surprise that he did so with panache.
It begins, not surprisingly, with a woman. A woman who shows up at Doug’s desk in the St. Augustine on a cold January night to inform him there is the body of a naked old man upstairs. Beside him is a cardboard tube Doug decides to hide from the police, and inside the cardboard tube is $100,000 dollars in ones.
And being at sixes and sevens, Doug does what almost anyone in a Shaw novel might do, he quits his job, leaves town, gets a passport in a hurry with a help of friend he used to ski with, and gets the hell out of Dodge headed for Switzerland and the skiing, but not until he discovers the manager of the St. Augustine is in the hospital after two men roughed him up for no reason.
And it is there, in St. Moritz, he meets Miles Fabian, and the game is on.
Nightwork, I should mention, is a novel and not a thriller or caper. However much it flirts with the conventions of the genre, it is not about plot half so much as character, about a sort of late coming of age for the hero, and the magic brought into his life by the fabulous and not entirely scrupulous, Miles Fabian. Shaw is a much different writer, but this may remind you of some of the lighter novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.
Nightwork is a delight, smart, playful, real, human, and yet bubbly as good champagne with the kick of a Rye chaser. It is a heartfelt novel, one to read if you are in a sour mood or down on the world, Shaw’s idea of an old fashioned good read, and frankly mine too. As Shaw has his hero comment near the end of the book; “There’s nothing like a good deed for shining in a naughty world.â€
Nightwork is a good deed in a naughty world.
February 8th, 2019 at 9:14 am
I liked this one–I never read anything by Shaw that I didn’t like, he’s one of my favorite writers–but I read it soon after reading RICH MAN, POOR MAN, which I thought was great. So NIGHTWORK suffered a little by comparison. After reading this review, I’m thinking I ought to reread it.
February 8th, 2019 at 5:57 pm
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Shaw, I’m sorry to have to admit. Judy and I were totally caught up with RICH MAN POOR MAN when it shown on TV, as was half the country at the time, but except for the movie version of THE YOUNG LIONS, that’s it for me and Shaw.
But I will never forget the latter. The day after I saw it in the local theater — this would have been whee I was in Junior High — a friend asked me how I liked it. OK, I guess, I said, which was also all I had to say.
Ken then went to considerable detail about what he thought about it — high points and low, good and bad. I was amazed. I never realized that people could actually have Opinions abut movies.
Or books for that matter. In English classes I’d had to do Book Reports, of course, but all I’d ever done is write long synopses, in detail, of what happened in the story.
Once I realized that you actually say what you liked about a book or movie, a whole new world opened up to me.
An epiphany, if you will, and that’s why I will always remember Irwin Shaw.
February 8th, 2019 at 7:05 pm
Shaw was one of the great writer writers of his era,an old fashioned storyteller with a great voice who managed to straddle literacy and entertainment while seldom leaning so far one way or the other to put off those reading him for the one or the other.
I was lucky that he was one of the first mainstream novelists I read as an older teen, and opened up a whole new world of great writers by the likes of Morris L. West and James Gould Cozzens, so I owe Shaw a debt too.
February 8th, 2019 at 7:09 pm
And as both of you point out, you can’t compare this to RICH MAN POOR MAN, this is a souffle and that’s a six course meal. Sometimes a souffle is good though if prepared right and its light enough.
It’s relatively short compared to some of the others mentioned, and a much more straightforward story, but it has tremendous heart and a good head as well.
February 8th, 2019 at 7:37 pm
Oddly, I have a childhood memory of Shaw too.
A teacher in 1965 read us out loud Shaw’s short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” (1939).
The only other work by Shaw read here is the short story “Gunners’ Passage”. It’s a harrowing tale of WWII and PTSD.
He’s credited as co-writer of the classic film “The Talk of the Town”.
February 9th, 2019 at 9:02 am
“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” and “The Eighty Yard Run” are considered to be Shaw’s best short stories, and they’re really good, but my favorite, which I reread every couple of years and recommend at every opportunity, is “Main Currents of American Thought”.
February 10th, 2019 at 9:28 am
I would recommend reading Shaw’s collected short stories. The ones James mentions are particularly memorable, but I enjoyed the whole book (as well as RICH MAN, POOR MAN).
February 10th, 2019 at 10:43 am
Re Irwin Show: Two Weeks In Another Town is a marvelous read, turned into a pretty terrible film that gutted just about everything of value in Shaw’s novel. The book, highly recommended.
February 10th, 2019 at 10:36 pm
The complete Shaw short stories, STORIES FROM FIVE DECADES is a thick (over 1,000 pages) collecting all of his published short fiction, and one of the best buys you can make. There was originally a mass market paperback edition and it is available on Kindle too.
It’s a hell of a bargain in almost any format.
Barry,
TWO WEEKS is a great book as is the not quite sequel EVENING IN BYZANTIUM which again was made into a movie that had little to do with the book).