Savages by Don Winslow

I’m just wrapping up Anthony Jeselnick’s July book club pick. Jeselnick said he wanted to give us a breezy read for the month.

Don Winslow’s Savages was the breeziest slog I’ve encountered in a long while.

I’m not against overly stylized storytelling. I am against a style that purposely goes out of its way to wink at the audience every other page. Imagine watching Pulp Fiction and having Samuel L. Jackson mugging directly into the camera after every one liner or cool bit of dialogue he delivers. It gets old fast.

Real fast.

The authorial decisions Winslow makes just don’t work for me. The overall novel reminded me of the work of Max Barry, maybe with a dash of Scott Sigler. And that’s a problem in my case, since what I want as a reader and writer are entirely at odds with what those authors seem to care about. Reading Savages or a novel like Jennifer Government is like standing in an interminable soup line waiting for some guy at the counter to ladle out a big bowl of Go Fuck Yourself.

I’ve learned over the years that I’m not likely to enjoy a story that’s not anchored in character exploration. The character doesn’t need to grow or change over the course of the narrative; the character doesn’t need to be likeable. But I do need to feel like I’m getting insight. I need to feel like I’m spending time with a real person. In that sense, there are any number of brilliant, well-regarded authors who just don’t do it for me. In my personal Encyclopedia of Novelists Who Don’t Write Characters, A is for Asimov. B is for Max Barry.

And W is for Winslow. At least in Savages, my only sampling of his work. That’s not to say that he’s a bad writer—there are several funny moments and nifty word play scattered throughout the novel. These occasions are just in the service of thin characters, relentlessly intrusive authorial eyewinks, plot handwaving, and other silly bullshit that maybe Chuck Palahniuk or David Foster Wallace can get away because they know when to pick their moments. In this book, just about every page is a moment.

The story is simple enough. Two young friends in Southern California, one an ex-SEAL, the other a horticulturalist raised by two Jewish psychiatrists, go into business together growing and selling perfected strains of marijuana. This attracts the unwelcome attention of a Mexican drug cartel who wants to horn in on their business. After the fellows refuse to play ball, the cartel kidnaps the girlfriend they’re both sort of sharing, and the guys embark on a series of almost stakes-free escapades to get her back. There are a few computer hacking hijinks about as realistic as Ferris Bueller changing his absentee total (or David Lightman breaking into the Department of Defense…I guess Matthew Broderick was attracted to hacker roles in the 80s); there are some heist hijinks that give a nod to Point Break, complete with rubber masks of ex-Presidents. None of this requires the reader to pay much attention. This novel is written like it’s made to be skimmed.

While skimming, we learn a bit about the cartel and a few satellite characters whose names I forget because they were never all that important in the first place. The horticulturalist, Ben, has a little bit of character. (Winslow feels highly enough about him that he keeps telling us we need to think highly of him too). The ex-SEAL, Chon, has next to none beside his “badittude.” They’re likeable enough, I guess, but hardly more than names on a page like everyone else who graces the book. Winslow apparently loved them so much he wrote a prequel detailing their backstory and called it The Kings of Cool, a title that’s presumably winking at and doubling down on the style in Savages. I won’t be reading it to find out.