Welcome to TR Book Club, a recurring (?) feature in which I conscript a friend to read and discuss an old novel.
Max Bell is a music journalist and fiction writer from Los Angeles. His story “Doppel” won New Ohio Review’s 2021 Fiction Contest, and his monthly SPIN column, Blue Chips, profiles up-and-coming rap artists. He holds an MFA in fiction from Cal State Long Beach.
In this installment of TR Book Club, we jam about Elmore Leonard’s 1990 novel Get Shorty.
Pete: Elmore Leonard has an intimidatingly large body of work, but Get Shorty seems to be one of his more renowned novels — I was familiar with the Travolta movie, and apparently it was readapted as a cable series a few years ago. I'm not sure if it enjoys this reputation because it's emblematic of Leonard's genre writing, or because it's an outlier. I read a few of Leonard's '70s novels a while ago, and I recall them being more straightforward and character-driven, whereas Get Shorty (which was published the month I was born) is a very metafictional satire. What made you pick this one up?
Max: Get Shorty has always been the first novel I associate with Elmore Leonard, largely because the cover of the Travolta flick stared at me in video store aisles as a kid. Somehow, I'd never watched the film adaptation until earlier this year. I was taken with it immediately. It's a charming, hilarious, and self-aware Hollywood satire with some fun albeit obvious plotting, the perfect movie to drop in on once you've seen it once. (Aside: Hackman is great as, well, a hack director.)
When I watched Get Shorty, I was at the tail end of working on a screenplay. As an occasional fiction writer and aspiring screenwriter, I thought reading Leonard's work might prove instructive. He's had several works adapted into excellent movies — Jackie Brown (based on Leonard's Rum Punch) ranks highly among my favorite Tarantino joints — and reading Get Shorty could give me insight into how someone might adapt a novel for the screen.
Pete: Yeah, even reading the first few chapters, I was struck by how Tarantino-ish the whole affair feels — the chattiness, the quippiness, the name-dropping. The characters are a little too stylish to be believable, but all in service of a tight plot. I didn’t know Jackie Brown was based on a Leonard novel until I was reading his Wikipedia page, and now it occurs to me that those talky, violent ensemble thrillers I associate with Tarantino — and with the ‘90s more broadly — probably owe a lot to Leonard’s aesthetic.
I encounter this problem when approaching retrospective genre work. Like, I know The Godfather is a great film, but from my vantage it’s hard to separate it from the glut of derivative mob flicks that followed, to the point where it kind of obscures the original achievement. The first rule of criticism is you need to distinguish the art from its influence. But as a consumer? Well, I imagine Get Shorty was revelatory in 1990, but we came of age at a time when, like, Ocean’s Eleven was on cable every weekend. This is, of course, a function of perspective. Do you read a lot of crime fiction?
Max: Agreed 100%. I know Tarantino is a fan of quippy and fast-talking flicks like His Girl Friday (1940), but there's an argument to be made that he's indebted to Leonard for the idiosyncratic, pop culture-literate gangster character. Get Shorty was published in 1990, so it's unlikely the book had much influence on Reservoir Dogs, but Tarantino likely had time to read Get Shorty and Rum Punch (1992) before Pulp Fiction. Drawing the line from Leonard to Tarantino becomes even easier when you consider Travolta plays said hip gangster in Get Shorty and Pulp Fiction. I can understand the "landmark achievements in genre work are tainted by the legions of imitators" problem, but I do my utmost to grant the originators their due credit and kind of marvel at all the ways they've been ripped off.
I'm definitely a crime fiction fan, though I haven't read as much of it as I'd like. I'm mostly a Raymond Chandler devotee, someone accustomed to (and enamored with) sardonic and hardboiled dialogue and highly stylized prose. Before speeding through Get Shorty, I'd savored every page of David Goodis's Nightfall, which I recommend until the ending. And supposing I had to pick my favorite crime novel, it'd be a four-way tie between Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, Cain's Double Indemnity, Ellroy's Brown's Requiem, and Jonathan Lethem's dystopian neo-noir Gun, with Occasional Music.
Pete: Cool, thanks for the recs. Wasn’t really familiar with Goodis, and in spite of your best efforts I’ve somehow avoided Lethem entirely (probably because I associate him with Michael Chabon, which may be another problem of perspective). Thinking about Leonard’s mechanics in Get Shorty, a few things jump out at me. For one, it’s a crime novel without any cops, which appeals to me. On the other hand, even the putative bad guys are written as likable characters, and Leonard does that thing a lot of his contemporaries did where he kind of writes Italian-Americans like zoo animals.
I guess that’s another personal grievance — the voice is incredibly subtle, and once I got used to it I found the pacing rather pleasant. My ebook included an epilogue from the late ‘90s in which Leonard spoke on his process, and he kept emphasizing how, in a third-person narrative, the narrator should be invisible. I’m not sure I agree, but as a critic, I find Get Shorty pretty bulletproof. How about you as a writer?
Max: As far as fiction broadly and crime fiction specifically, Get Shorty was a change of pace for me. It's very slick and fast-paced, with rarely a sentence or line of dialogue that doesn't drive the plot forward. In that respect, it makes for a great casual read. And having watched Get Shorty before reading the book, it's remarkable how much of his dialogue makes it to the screen and how well it translates. If nothing else, reading Leonard is perfect for anyone who wants to write natural dialogue.
That said, I agree with you in that I disagree with Leonard's perspective on third-person narration. The narrator can be invisible, but I think the text becomes richer when there's a distinct narrative voice. I've only read one and a half Leonard novels, but my guess is that much of his work lacks a unique voice. Perhaps he worked really hard to erase himself? And perhaps that's why his characters have to deliver such snappy and fun dialogue. When you don't rely much on your narrative prose, the dialogue has to stand on its own.
Pete: Online criticism is all about the establishment and gatekeeping of canons, so perhaps we’ll leave our readers with this. Where does Get Shorty rank in your crime-fic canon?
Max: As for where it ranks for me, it sits below all of the books I mentioned above. That said, I'd re-read it and was inclined to read more of Leonard after finishing it. As I type this, I'm about halfway through Rum Punch.