Stirring case of déjà vu
The Force By Don Winslow William Morrow 496 pp; $ 34.99
Don Winslow is t he rare crime writer who seems forever restless. His wildly successful novels can lurch dramatically from one to the next in tone and approach. He’s written laid- back surfer detective books, hyper-stylized, ultraviolent experiments, like Savages, and, more recently, deeply researched thumpers inspired by the horrors of the Mexican drug cartels.
Winslow’s newest novel, The Force, represents another move. Like almost everything else he’s written, it’s deeply propulsive. It’s the first thing I’ve read since my baby was born in May that had me choosing a book over sleep in the middle of the night. But for Winslow, it also feels like a step back. The Force is an exceptionally fun read, but it doesn’t seem new on any level. The world it explores — corrupt cops on an elite task force — has been explored already, and explored and explored again. Especially compared to his last book, The Cartel, it feels derivative — more like a spec script for an old cop show ( The Shield, maybe) than an original work.
That said, off- peak Don Winslow is still pretty good Don Winslow, better, in fact, by several orders of magnitude than most other crimes writers currently working. And The Force does have a lot of what makes his best work crackle.
The book focuses on a narrow window in the life of Denny Malone, an Irish kid from Staten Island who grew up to become an elite detective in the Manhattan North Special Task Force ( The titular “Force” in question).
Malone is your bog standard bad cop with a heart of gold. In the eyes of his colleagues and of the drug gangs of the city, he is the “king” of Manhattan North. He rules the streets, lines his pockets and keeps the worst of the violence tamped down. He may take money from the mob, in other words. He may rip off drug dealers and lie on the stand. But he has a code. He loves his brother cops. He keeps civilians safe. He always takes care of his family, even if he doesn’t technically live with them anymore.
Plot- wise, if the book is about anything, it’s about the erosion of those standards, or seen another way, about the realization that they never existed at all. It’s pretty standard cop- tale stuff, really, if told with electric pacing. The book opens with Malone in jail then lays out the drip- by- drip process that landed him there. Along the way, you’ll be shocked to discover, we find out that not only is Malone corrupt, the whole system is corrupt, too: the judges, the prosecutors, the politicians. Everyone’s dirty. But in the end, it’s Malone left holding the bag.
What is novel about The Force is that it’s set against the backdrop of America’s changing relationship to police violence. The book exists in the real world of Black Lives Matter, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. The book’s most telling moment comes when one of Malone’s partners, a black detective, admits he’s thinking of leaving New York, at least in part because he fears his teenage son will be shot by a fellow cop.
In the book, Winslow adds a fictional police shooting to the long list of real ones that exist in the non- fiction world. A grand jury investigation into that killing hangs over the action in the book. The novel reaches its apocalyptic, action movie climax ( The film rights to The Force have long since been sold), just as Malone’s downfall seems sealed, and the verdict comes in. In the final chapters of the book, Malone, bereft of his brothers, his money and his pride, pushes through the burning streets one last time, trying to pull off a final, quixotic act.
There’s a patina of social verite to the Force, a flick toward the narrative depth Winslow showed in The Cartel. But in the end, the actual issues, the real story of police violence and even violence against police, feel tacked on. The Force works best, when it works, as pure genre fun. When Winslow strains here to be poignant — in the final Kurtz- up- the- river scenes, for example — he falls well short. He aims for catharsis and ends with an eye-roll.
That doesn’t negate the pleasure found elsewhere in the book. It takes tremendous skill to make something this long ( almost 500 pages) feel this lean. But it does leave the final product well short of Winslow’s best. There’s a creative joy and obsessive depth to some of his books, a rollicking, risk- taking originality to others. The Force doesn’t really have any of that.
It’s a fine book, sure, but it isn’t individual. It reads like it could have been written by any of a dozen writers, each plot beat as predictable as the last.