The problem with books is that there are lots of ways to ruin them. I mean, say, for instance, you have a really good idea for a caper novel. José Latour clearly did. I mean, October 1958, Havana, the government falling apart, a group of small time grifters, the World Series, a dying pope, corrupt cops, Meyer Lansky, brutal cops, incompetent cops, political strife, gang strife, and lots and lots of money. Good idea, check.
The idea needs to be put into a well-constructed plot. He’s got that. The choices aren’t altogether my choices, but the plot of Havana World Series (New York: Grove 2003) is complicated, sensible, and surprising. Plot, check.
If the characters annoy me, the book will probably annoy me. You might want to have characters that are sympathetic, but flawed in interesting ways, to have a variety of different ones from different backgrounds interacting, and to reveal things about them as you go along. Check. Mariano Contreras is a sympathetic killer, cold-blooded but rather sweet, thoughtful, very good at planning but neither omniscient nor incapable of error. The minor characters are also, for the most part, good.
But it turns out that all that is still not enough. If the writing is annoying, if it bores me with unnecessary and uninteresting detail (such as the exact time—8:14—that a note is passed from hand to hand on an evening when nothing else will happen until ten o’clock), if things I already know about the plot are repeated several times, if minor characters birthdates, hairstyles and clothes are listed in the manner of an all-points bulletin, if, after all, I am bored out of my proverbial by two-hundred pages in, then the book fails.
Which is, you know, a shame. It had so much going for it.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
Clearly the thing to do is turn it into a movie. That would give you the idea, the plot, and the characters, without the clunky prose.
Just be careful that it doesn’t turn into a summer release, or you’ll get half the idea, cardboard characters, and Kevin Costner playing Mariano Contreras as the cold-blooded but far too earnest killer.
The endless minor flavor details do sound like notes for a possible movie adaptation — and that sort of thing does interfere tremendously with a good read.