Assassin Of The Apocalypse

I don’t want to know your reasons.  If he owes you or he beat you or she swindled you or he got the promotion you wanted or you want to fuck his wife or she fucked your man or you bumped into each other on the subway and he didn’t say sorry.  I don’t care.

I’m not your Father Confessor.

Think of me more like a bullet.

Just point.

Such is the voice of Spademan, former garbage collector in New Jersey and now a hitman for hire in Adam Sternbergh’s noir novel, Shovel Ready (2014).  The voice of Sternbergh’s debut work, and the clipped, staccato style it embodies throughout, is one of the distinguishing features of a swiftly-paced, well-plotted thriller.  Another distinguishing feature is the setting, a post-9/11, post-apocalyptic New York and New Jersey, in which Times Square has been completely sealed off as a radioactive hazard, and most of the former occupants of the region have either left the area in droves or used their wealth and power to seal themselves inside virtual reality cocoons, wherein they can live any kind of life they want.

Spademan will kill nearly anyone for the right price–men, women, blacks, whites–using a boxcutter as his primary weapon, a symbolic reference to 9/11 that will never cease to creep me out.  He doesn’t discriminate, but he does have limits.  He won’t kill children because “that’s a different kind of psycho,” and, when a virtual-reality televangelist sends Spademan out to kill his own daughter (think about that one for a second), he discovers he has one more limit:  he won’t kill a pregnant woman.

Sternbergh’s swiftness of style is impressive, and very hard to pull off.  Most of the paragraphs we read are short–no longer than the passage I’ve quoted above.  That means Sternbergh has chosen every word of this book with great care.  I read the novel in a single night, and anyone else could do the same.  Yet you’ll emerge from that evening with a sharply-detailed picture of what New York could look like in the not-too-distant future and, if I may say so, what New Jersey looks like now–a landscape of dark, abandoned buildings and derelict lives in the shadows, with impenetrable penthouses soaring to unreachable heights in an unimaginable distance.

If I have one reservation about Shovel Ready, it is that, despite its terrific, gritty texture, the book is still not as dark as it could be or should be.  Sternbergh’s models are Sam Spade and science fiction.  It’s a great mashup, but Spademan is a hitman, not a conflicted private eye.  He should be relentless and utterly clear, as is the assassin in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.  Since the role model is Spade, however, it would have been fun to see Spademan make a few bad choices–really bad ones–in the story.  Instead, he makes only tough choices, not wrong ones.  Because a hitman’s job is to wipe out people who’ve already made the worst choice possible, our guy should be far less compassionate than he turns out to be.  But this is only the first of the Spademan novels.  His darkest days, one hopes,  are yet to come.