Falco, Edward: Wolf Point

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I knew, reading the delightfully specific, musical second sentence of Edward Falco's Wolf Point, that the book would be something special:

"On the side of the road a pulp tableau coalesced: a young woman somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one in red leather pants over black boots and a white silk blouse opened three buttons down, with blond hair flying out from her head wild and wind blown and radiant in the horizontal light of late afternoon, put one foot up on a black guitar case and stuck out her arm in hitchhiker pose."

Fifty-seven-year-old Tom "T" Walker pulls over in that horizontal light to pick up the girl--Jenny, her names turns out to be--and the long-haired, hoodlum-looking older man she's traveling with, Lester. Tom knows the hitchhikers are probably trouble, that they may well rob him and leave him for dead a few miles on, but he picks them up anyway: why he does so is the first mystery of this brief, compelling novel.

Falco follows his three characters during the troubled weekend they spend together, first driving through the night in Tom's Land Rover, then at a cabin on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. As the relationships among his principals evolve and unravel Falco slowly peels back the layers of their characters. Jenny and Lester reveal themselves to Tom in stages, in their behavior and in the stories they tell about themselves, though how much of what they say is deliberate falsehood and how much the product of misguided interpretation is open to debate. Tom, on the other hand, shares nothing of himself with his fellow characters. His back-story is revealed to readers in his memories, while he tries--amid the dramatic events of his present day--to understand for himself just how he came to be where he is, how he turned into the man for whom the prospect of being robbed and beaten by strangers was preferable to its alternative. Falco's book is concerned both with whether Tom will survive his weekend by the river, and perhaps more importantly with whether survival is something he is still interested in.

There is one element of Tom's back-story that struck me as improbable, that his ex-wife would have exacted from him the punishment, so inappropriately severe, that has left him damaged. Otherwise, I have no complaints: Wolf Point is a fine, gripping piece of writing that you'll want to down in a sitting or two.