“It was the most mundane of circumstances, but as I started my engine, I experienced an uncustomary flash into the future, and I did not like what I saw.”
“Until very recently, one of the reasons for my honesty was my contentment with my life, the whole social matrix into which I fit and functioned. But when you decide you won’t miss home, what keeps you from stealing the family car to get away?”
A family friend from Long Island, New York, recently told me that his favorite book is “Gold Coast,” by Nelson DeMille, and that he reads it every summer. As I was making pretty good progress on the books that I had determined that I wanted to read this year, I decided on a whim (and that recommendation) to add it to the fold. While my impression was that it fell far short of being considered a classic, I couldn’t help but get reeled into the character sketches, the setting and the lifestyles.
I’ll interject here to say that, as a rule, an introduction should be never be read before the book -- even though I’m re-reading that phrasing and realizing how odd that sounds. It usually gives away far too much of the story and plot, and should be saved until afterwards (though I’m now realizing that I don’t think I ever did go back and read it). This marks the end of the part where I offer you unsolicited advice on how to read a book.
Now, DeMille’s prose was fairly simple, often spiced up with social commentary and some legitimately humorous turns of phrase, but also making use of cheesy foreshadowing and not-so-cryptic lead-ins at the end of chapters. However, the dynamic becomes much more complicated when we are eventually shown some of the hypocrisy of the narrator, John Sutter. Most of his dialogue alternates between humor (“This is not California, where your car accounts for fifty percent of your personality.” and “I shouldn’t have had the fourth or fifth martini. Actually, the fifth was okay. It was the fourth I shouldn’t have had.”) and existentialism (“But I want to tell my children about this; I want to tell them to find their green light, and I wish that for one magic hour on a summer’s evening, a weary nation would pause and reflect, and each man and woman would remember how the world once looked and smelled and felt and how nice it was to draw such supreme comfort and security by the simple act of putting one’s hand into the hand of a father or mother.”). As a result, it is hard to get a sense of what is going on with Sutter, who he is, what makes him tick and what is truly bothering him. He seems both drawn to and repulsed by the preppy, white-collar, too-much-money life, with many of his observations reading like entries from Stuff White People Like.
But a little more than 100 pages into the novel, Sutter appears to the reader to have some type of nervous breakdown -- speculating here, but I’m guessing that barking at a Mafia don’s wife on her property and getting shot at by his soldiers qualifies. From that point on, as Sutter involuntarily but willingly (if that makes sense) gets drawn into the world of Frank Bellarosa, the book starts to read much more like a precursor to “The Sopranos”: following a Mafia big shot as he wades his way through ordinary, day-to-day life, navigating between acceptable and unacceptable social behavior. Though Sutter is offered ways out many different times, it is like he cannot help himself -- like he is fascinated with and mesmerized by watching himself getting nailed by a train in slow-motion, aided by a strange admiration for who and what Bellarosa is.
“‘Tolkien said, ‘It doesn’t do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you leave near him.’”
“In some perverse way we can all relate to the rebel, the pirate, the outlaw. His existence is proof that this life does not squash everyone and that today’s superstate cannot get us all into lockstep.”
The harsh reality is that John Sutter is an asshole, plain and simple, self-describing himself as a “preppie thug.” While Bellarosa is painted as the “bad guy” by both society and the Gold Coast community, isn’t it actually Sutter who is being investigated for tax fraud, committing perjury, ostracizing his family and sabotaging his marriage? Even in his own musings, Sutter seems to be aware of his impending slide into misery: “ … showing more ego than judgment, proceeded to ruin his life so he could show everyone a thing or two.” Once the reader becomes cognizant of this identity of Sutter, the idea of narrator-as-asshole brings up lots of issues of trust between you as the reader and Sutter. While I found him to be funny and a smart-ass (both qualities ascribed to me by various people in various, colorful ways), his social, religious, caste and class commentaries within the writing are both thought-provoking and hypocritical.
The book is filled with strange, unexpected turns, but the one plot “twist” that most of the novel revolves around -- the depth of the relationship between Frank and John’s wife, Susan (“I would not describe her as unhappy, but rather as someone who is trying to decide if it’s worth the effort to be unhappy.”) -- is the least surprising, which adds further doubt to the validity of the narrator. How can what seems so obvious to the reader elude Sutter for, what, 500 pages? The hints peppered throughout the book force us to consider whether Sutter intentionally ignored them, since they were never articulated in his voice. Even the FBI guy in the middle, Mancuso (“I am the voice of truth and reality. Listen to my voice. That man will destroy you and your family. And it will be your fault, Mr. Sutter, not his fault. For the love of God, tell him to leave you alone.”), tells Sutter that evil is seductive, making the reader feel as if Sutter HAD to finally be understanding the Susan-Bellarosa dynamic.
“But like I told you once, sometimes you can’t get even. Sometimes you go to take the hit and be happy you’re still on your feet. Then the next time you’re a little tougher and a little smarter.” -- Bellarosa
“Though perhaps like Frank Bellarosa, and like Susan, I should have acted on my more primitive instincts, on fifty thousand years of past human experience. Instead, I rationalized, philosophized, and intellectualized when I should have listened to my emotions, which had always said to me, ‘He is a threat to your survival. Kill him.’” -- Sutter
We also see that Bellarosa is carefully manipulating Sutter throughout, turning him into an Italian in subtle yet marked ways. While it does seem rather far-fetched that a Mafia don would go to these lengths to bring an outsider into the fold, handling him directly, maybe he did legitimately like Sutter. Is that why he gives him so many chances to get out? Or does he just feel some remorse about the shambles he has made of Sutter’s life and marriage?
“‘Whaddya gonna do? You gonna curl up and die? You see a deal, you make a deal.’”
The plot lost credibility with me when a hit on a Mafia don didn’t involve a head shot, allowing Frank to survive thanks to his bullet-proof vest. From then on, the book takes on a bit of a surreal feel, from the odd intentional-boat-sinking by Sutter to Susan’s painting as a symbol of her craziness (“She has flaming-red hair, a sure sign of insanity according to my aunt Cornelia …”). Though I found the wrapup to be sort of trite and overly maudlin, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being intimately wrapped into these people’s lives and feeling almost sorry for the downfalls of the rich, spoiled and unaccountable.
That’s why I was a little surprised to be as excited as I was to see and read the excerpt from “The Gatehouse” -- the sequel to “Gold Coast” -- at the end of the book. Released 18 years after “Gold Coast” was written (1990), it supposedly follows the travails of Sutter as he returns to the Gold Coast after a decade in London, divorced from Susan. I ordered it and will admittedly find some way to fit it into the reading schedule as something of a guilty pleasure.
As to “Gold Coast,” I read it without any preconceived notions or expectations, and while I found it both funnier and less sophisticated than I might have guessed, I was also completely captivated. And at the end of the day, there aren’t many higher compliments you can pay a book.
“‘But like Christ said, ‘What is a man profited if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”
“And there was a time, you know, not so long ago, as recently as my own childhood in fact, when everyone believed in the future and eagerly awaited it or rushed to meet it. But now nearly everyone I know or used to know is trying to slow the speed of the world as the future starts to look more and more like someplace you don’t want to be.”
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