ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

Eddie Little

Imagine someone making a story about people like the armed robbery couple in the first and last scenes of “Pulp Fiction”...without the John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson characters, and, oh, yes, without all of Quentin Tarantino’s witty dialogue. You have just imagined first-time novelist Eddie Little’s “Another Day In Paradise.” As a matter of fact, “Paradise” seems lifted directly out of the pages of the original pulp fiction, those cheap thrill, Depression-era dime novels that were low on character development and plotline and high on violence and sex. Only an experienced writer of great skill could produce sympathy for this book’s crew of druggies, prostitutes, murderers, and thieves. Eddie Little is not an experienced writer of great skill.

The main object of proposed sympathy is Bobbie, a white, psychotically-violent fourteen-going-on-fifteen methamphetamine addict who you wouldn’t want to be caught in front of at an outdoors ATM. When we are first introduced to Bobbie he is a runaway, living on 1970’s-era big city streets (exactly what big city, I’m not really certain) and breaking into vending machines to support the chemical habits of himself and Rosie, his teenage hooker girlfriend. Early on they meet Mel and his girlfriend Sid, experienced adult thieves who think Bobbie is short and ballsy enough to be the inside man on a burglary. The book is the story of their crime-spreeing tour across the country, breaking into establishments from the midwest to the west coast and eventually breaking apart from a combination of bad karma and bad habits.

The story is told in the first person from Bobbie’s point of view, and that is it’s first and most serious problem. Bobbie is a chatty speed freak and to his credit, Little seems to have gotten his voice dead-on. But that works to the author’s disadvantage, since how many readers want to spend three or four hours curled up with a chatty speed freak? Bobbie is intent on finding new and (to him) interesting ways of saying things in every sentence, and so we are treated to endless phrasings like “you’re hotter than a freshly fucked fox in a forest fire,” or “knee-buckling, eye-popping, bone crushing fear,” or my perverse favorite “[t]he puke comes out in Technicolor, not just multicolored but full of portents and omens just beyond my grasp.”

Further, Bobbie spends far too much time, early and often, trying to justify his own violent actions:

“My dad is a very sick guy. Not that he beats us up, but that I didn’t try to stop him. I feel like the ultimate piece of shit because I’d hidden under the table instead of attacking him when he started beating my mom, knowing deep down that I was a coward and that he was right. I deserved to die. I determined to do my best to try and take him with me next time around. That’s a heavy load for a five-year-old kid. Sadly, it’s many years later, and every time I look in the mirror I see a shorter, blue-eyed version of him. Pops has strong genetics.”

I know, I know, we’re supposed to feel sorry for the kid, and we should. He’s had it tough. But having him tell the story himself (shortly after stabbing a security guard in the stomach with a sharpened screwdriver and then kicking him in the head until his jawbone comes through the skin) is like having a mugger stick a revolver under your chin and telling you, “Give it up, man, I’ve been having a bad day.” Put the gun down, sir, and then we’ll talk about your troubles.

“Paradise”’s storyline sags all over, unable to carry its own weight. Little’s sense of dramatic pacing is to have characters engage in long, rambling, philosophical discussions on their way to and from graphically written scenes of drug trips, sex, and/or violence. The sex is presented like a fifteen year old taking notes on a bad porn movie, and the book offers up some of the most gratuitously violent scenes I’ve ever encountered, including (incredibly) a scalping by a Native American character.

Penguin’s publicists make much of the fact that Eddie Little knows what he’s writing about because he’s spent years as a drug-user, criminal, and convict. Which is okay, I suppose, until they got to the part about calling him “America’s answer to Jean Genet.” Genet? Come on, guys. Genet had something to say and knew how to say it. If Eddie Little has got something to say, he doesn’t know how yet.