There’s a type of crime story that’s simply a great “hang.” In the film world, that definition would apply to Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was more about its characters, actor Rick Dalton and stuntman Cliff Booth, and its vivid setting than its rather thin plot developments. Recently, Emma Cline’s The Guest struck me as an interesting “hang,” in which our protagonist wanders Long Island not through a traditional narrative construction but simply from one house to another, exhibiting her character in her tiny myriad ways. Both of these works of art are no less mesmerizing because they lack robust plotlines. Far from it! In fact, I’d wager that these types of stories—following the intricate ways we flawed humans interact in the most mundane moments—can offer some of the most fascinating examples of storytelling. At least, when they’re done well.
Richard Lange does them very well.
Coming off his 2021 vampire novel Rovers (a startling left turn into the supernatural), Lange has returned to the milieu of his earlier work—that is, the complicated, often desperate lives of lost souls living on the edge of crime in the contemporary American southwest. The Lange novels I initially fell in love with, from This Wicked World to Angel Baby to The Smack, reach their tendrils into the author’s latest in the form of character detail and setting. Joe Hustle introduces 40-year-old Joe Howard, a damaged, broke ex-con who’s essentially eking his way through a sordid life. He’s an ex-Marine (shades of both This Wicked World and The Smack) taking jobs where he can find them, from bartender (shades of This Wicked World) to convenience-store clerk to house painting. He’s also laying his head wherever he can find a place, whether crashing at a reluctant buddy’s place or splurging low funds on a shady hotel (shades of The Smack). The underbelly of the Los Angeles setting is described by simmering violence and illicit drugs (shades of Angel Baby). It’s an atmosphere that Lange has often explored, even in his short fiction, and in Joe Hustle the environment feels as much a character as Joe himself.
It’s at one of Joe’s odd jobs that he encounters Emily, and thus begins a tentative and gradually almost obsessive courtship. She’s the wild sister of a customer in the Hollywood hills, and at first it’s all about awkward flirting. But their stations in life are quite different: He’s teetering on the edge of a dark abyss, and she’s a rich, seemingly bipolar young lady who’s dealing with her own issues but has a thirst for fun. A connection happens, and the two indelible personalities find a way to navigate their mutually choppy day-to-day waters. Finally, extraneous circumstances in Joe’s life—namely, a bad interaction with a local dealer and an overall end-of-his-rope feeling to his hardscrabble existence—force him to accept Emily’s abrupt offer to accompany her on a mission across the southwest to see her long-lost daughter Phoebe in Austin, Texas. What follows, in the novel’s third act, is a sort of picaresque road-trip sequence that follows our down-on-his-luck rogue to Texas via Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon and Albuquerque on a quest to bring young Emily some closure. But the ending for these appealing ne’er-do-wells won’t be what the reader expects.
Lange excels at the seemingly innocuous interactions both between his precisely drawn characters and among the random people they encounter. It may seem at first glance that not a lot of consequence happens in Joe Hustle, but plot is secondary here. Joe and Emily’s minor adventures from town to town gradually build into a roadburn romance of the damaged, Joe in particular reacquiring his sense of self. Dealt a bad hand from the start—murdered father, abusive mother—Joe has had, until now, no luck rising from his self-imposed gutter, but Emily (her spirit, her flesh) brings out the best of him. And for her part, more and more of Emily’s true nature is revealed as the characters move south toward Phoebe. The climax of this road romance throws Emily into an unforgiving spotlight, revealing everything about herself and (in the process) about Joe. It’s a strong moment of character-building reaching a crescendo. And throughout the book, Lange reveals his chops as the subtle and exacting prose stylist he has always been. He’s a master of show-don’t-tell narration.
Interspersed with the main thrust of the narrative are alternating chapters that apparently lay out transcripts of Joe talking about his past experiences, perhaps to a therapist or someone in criminal justice. To this reader, these interstitial pieces didn’t fully connect. I’m sure that’s a failing of my own, but I’d rather have seen most of these details absorbed into the primary narrative. As short interruptions that come across as either pertinent or wildly random, their purpose is not entirely clear.
No matter. Joe Hustle is a great hang. It’s filled with unexpectedly weighty character moments that build to a startling illumination. It’s a hilarious book at times, and at other times quite horrific. Most of the time, it’s an amiable, page-turning pleasure. Joe and Emily are flawed people doing their best to navigate difficult avenues, both literally and figuratively. The roads they travel are pure Richard Lange, paved with grit and sheened with drug sweat. Joe Hustle is about low criminals and hot attraction, lazy ambition and desperate deception. Mostly it’s about two people making their way in and around all that, making a human connection wherever they can find purchase.
