Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)
Any bibliophile or bookworm out there is surely aware of the propensity of writers toward drink (occupational hazard). William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker. Parker once said that she didn’t keep notebooks because whenever she did keep one she’d invariably leave it behind in some bar or restaurant. It is also I hope commonly known that certain writers didn’t hit high gear until they got sober and more or less stayed that way. Popular favourites in this category include Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah. When Carver was teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop alongside pioneering dipsomaniac realist John Cheever, the two of them were known to make a hellacious scene wherever they went together, and when he ultimately got sober Carver said that his whole life thereafter became gravy. His writing for sure improved and book sales appear to confirm that. Elmore Leonard might be the greatest of the publicly recovering alcoholic novelists if only because he remains the most widely read and the most fun. His trajectory is pretty charming: first he wrote westerns drunk and then he wrote crime novels primarily set in the city of Detroit whilst stone cold sober. If Leonard is a bit like the Charles Dickens of Detroit he is even more like Honoré de Balzac because he has a whole universe unto itself where characters reappear novel to novel and the urban situation overlaps itself for purposes of creative merriment. Notably, Michael Keaton plays the same character in both Jackie Brown—Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant 1997 adaptation of Rum Punch—and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight from the following year, clearly yet another sly move on the part of the ever-canny Soderbergh. In Leonard’s novel Switch, the characters Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara reconvene; we met them in Rum Punch and they were played by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro respectively in Jackie Brown. Elmore Leonard, an ironist and a mischief-maker, definitely had fun writing. Character, milieu, dialogue, plotting: these, in a nutshell, are his forte. This is a writer in whose punchy vernacular to shoot someone with a shotgun is to “pump and bust him.” Trash culture, the sordid paperback or penny dreadful, tabloid titillation, pop art: yum, yes please. I don't know if Andy Warhol, producer of the movie Trash, was a Leonard fan, but, Christ, man, how could he not have been? The way to plot a page-turner is to keep the reader on the balls of they feet. Unknown Man No. 89 is an especially notable early Leonard crime yarn because of the sophistication of the plotting and because of its focus on alcoholism and recovery. This is also a darkly humorous novel not afraid to allow Virgil, a black underworld killer who wears a kind of stylish pimp stetson, to take a moment, breaking into a hotel room so as to steal all of a man’s papers and documents, to throw into the suitcase along with the designated spoils of the raid "a painting on the wall he liked of a cat out in a sailboat with the mast broken off and this terrible motherfucker storm coming at him. Virgil sat down and had his scotch and coke drink, wondering if the cat made it, then wondering where the cat had got the sailboat, if it was his or if he’d stolen it someplace and was trying to get away, shit, when the storm got him.” Bad guys up to bad business, but always this presiding, good-willed attention to the presiding human comedy, à la Balzac. This is the alchemist's gift of being able to make art of popular things. Elmore Leonard is also a more versatile writer than he is credited with being (doubtlessly on account of his best-selling popularity, equivalent to the adulterer’s branded A). Crime fiction usually functions and grabs us by presenting a kind of unobstructed heightened realism, as with writers as diverse as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith. Leonard is more than merely adept respective of that particular mode. At the same time, you have something like 1980’s City Primeval, which is probably about as close as American fiction gets—this side of William S. Burroughs or Robert Coover—to Hieronymus Bosch. In point of fact, I subtly reference that berserker in the opening lines of the Shroud Shifter song “The Rocket”…
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