Tough Guys

NO CHARACTER in a George Higgins novel ever knowingly purchased a product made in Finland, ate a spinach salad, contributed to Common Cause or crossed his 7s. Higgins people are tough, and spend their time doing one of two things--being tough or (more often) talking about being tough.

For the uninitiated, George V. Higgins is a Boston lawyer and sometime journalist who writes a terrific novel about Boston every year or so. About tough guys in Boston, that is. There may be, somewhere in the Hub area, a Higgins test range where the writer holds trials for admission to his casts of characters. Harvard degree? Reject Dukakis bumper sticker? So long, Faneuil Hall regular? Next Higgins's novels, you see, deal exclusively with a social set in this area that has neither the inclination nor the ability to be anything other than what it is--the royalty of a seedy commercial-political religious organized crime two-bit empire.

Every Higgins novel has a theme of sorts--a crime with which most of the characters in the novel are concerned. In his first, and still probably his best. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, it was auto theft, in the 1981 model. The Rat on Fire, it was arson for profit: in The Patriot Game, it is gun-running for profit and the greater glory of the provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. But whatever the crime of choice the novel is usually only an excuse to let the Higgins people talk

And how they do talk Not being personally tough enough to associate with the likes of Patriot Game players. I can't say really whether this chatter is "realistic." Maybe there are folks who heap thousand or two-thousand word monologues of abuse--positively awesome displays of obscenity-peppered grammatically correct spleen, veritable Vesuviuses of vilification--on one another, apparently without stopping for breath. But they sure are fun to read Town

"That's not what bothers me [say one fellow]. It's not that he's Irish, He isn't Irish Oh, he's got an Irish name, which I presume he inherited from his father. Although there are reports that his mother wasn't really sure who it was that was responsible for the sad event and took the easy way out by blaming the disaster on the last drunken longshoreman who paid a quarter to have his way with her down at the pier in Chelsea one night when she got lucky and went home with a grand total of two dollars and seventy-five cents, for the night's work and her bloomers around her ankles. Where they usually were when she was working for her meager living, doing the only thing that God gave her the talent to do And so on.

Though one shouldn't complain about the purveyor of such gloriously purient prose, it is tempting to wonder why Higgins doesn't try something a little more ambitious now that he has buffed the Boston low-life novel to such a perfect shine. The Patriot Game, in fact, would have been an excellent opportunity, because in it he touches on--but ultimately skirts--the issues of the American Irish feelings for their embattled brethren overseas. Jimmy Breslin, also a member in good-standing of the tough-guy school, made such an attempt in World Without End, Amen. Higgins implies that these Irishmen are not running guns just to make money, but he resists any exploration of that rich vein of sentiment and history.

TO HIGGIN'S CREDIT, however, he results some of the tough-guy cliches he spouts forth in his pompously awful weekly column about magazines in the Boston Globe. He gives himself the perfect tough-guy target--a wimpy prison bureaucrat who mouths the tired liberal dogma about "rehabilitation," Oh. Higgins destroys the wimp alright, but just when we expect the sermon about how the only thing dese guys understands is a kick in the ass. Higgins surprises us. And the worldly warden says, "my way wasn't very successful either' And he adds:

Maybe nobody can run it... Maybe we'll end up admitting that we're doing exactly what we have been doing all the time without admitting it--when a guy gets convicted of doing something serious, nobody's figured out how to give him the proper outlook on life. So we will lock him up for a good long time with a bunch of rats just as vicious as he is, and see if by the time he gets out he's lost interest in raising hell." Which seems to be about how it works

The only change from the previous novel that I can detect in The Patriot Game is a slight mellowing--exemplified in the protagonist. Pete Riordan, a tough (natch) federal agent who's trying to figure out what's going on In Eddie Coyle and Rat on Fire, the good guys don't fight the bad guys as much as the stupid and evil guys fight the stupider and eviler Riordan, however, is a hero-- a Vietnam vet with a bum leg and cynical pride in truth, justice and the American way Heart-warming it certainly ain't in Higginsland, Bambi would wind up on a rotisserie in about two seconds. It is curious to note that Higgins seems to think there may be some hope for us after all. But if you asked him, he'd deny it. Too tough.