21.11.2010
On a late spring day in the park, Alfredo Batista plans a robbery. Thuggery doesn't come easy to the young man—he "wishes he were more like the recently deceased John Gotti, a gangster who saw the pleasures in thieving, who'd hijack a truck full of fur coats just for the thrill of getting away with it." But alas, Gotti’s élan is not Alfredo's style, writes Matt Burgess in his debut novel "Dogfight".
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Alfredo is a 19-year-old weed dealer, high-school dropout and father-to-be living in Queens, New York. His father is confined to a wheelchair, his girlfriend is seven months along and his best friend is an anxious drug addict stricken with alopecia. Still, things aren't so bad: the girlfriend is beautiful, Alfredo's schemes are lucrative enough, and his mother's cooking is excellent.
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The problem is Tariq, Alfredo's older brother and a man whose impending release from jail is worrisome for several reasons. The circumstances of Tariq's imprisonment involve a stick-up job in which Alfredo chickened out at the last minute. When police arrived two days after the robbery to arrest Tariq, local busybodies speculated that Alfredo had set his older brother up. "That's some awfully quick police work," the neighbours said. But life moved on, and Alfredo and Tariq's girlfriend fell in love. The happy couple is expecting the child when the book begins. When the time comes for Tariq's release, Alfredo scrambles to find a paying gig impressive enough to ensure that his brother will want to work with him rather than kill him. But the crime Alfredo comes up with isn't so foolproof, someone dies and Tariq returns as an entirely different person.
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Matt Burgess, who hails from the New York neighbourhood where "Dogfight" is set, is a talent to watch. He possesses an ear for dialogue that rivals Richard Price and a pacy sense of plot reminiscent of another fantastic recent debut, Josh Bazell's "Beat the Reaper". His style is strikingly visual—Burgess doesn't sketch scenes so much as paint them as big and bright as a playground mural.
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The characters, too, are something else. Max Marshmallow is a 72-year-old bodega owner who reads four newspapers per day with a yellow highlighter in hand, researching a nascent book titled "A Comprehensive History of New York Schemes". "When Alfredo started peddling reefer on the sidewalk," Burgess writes, "it must have challenged Max's sepia vision of The Way Things Were—but as a functioning New Yorker, he quickly adapted to The Way Things Is." Other characters are summed up in the course of a single vivid sentence: a homely man is "eminently punkable"; the neighbourhood ice-cream truck throws kids into a ‘lactose frenzy’ and an unfortunate fellow sweats "like Patrick Ewing at the foul line."
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Aside from a few lapses into sentimentality—impulses that an editor probably could have squashed—Burgess is an energetic and disciplined writer. Most importantly, "Dogfight" is tremendously fun to read.
