Suburban Dicks

The cover drew my attention so I opened up the book and saw this Author’s Note:

West Windsor and Plainsboro are real towns in New Jersey. Unlike the snarky description in the book, it’s a pretty good area to live in . . . I mean, as far as New Jersey goes . . .

I was amused enough to read this aloud to the person with me in the bookstore, who then said, This sounds like your kind of book. You should get it. So I did.

I liked the book. It delivered what it promised: fun characters, jokes, and enough plot to keep me turning the pages. It also did a good job with the balance necessary in non-hard-boiled mystery stories, keeping it entertaining without dodging the seriousness of the crimes. This balance is not always easy; to my taste, it’s violated by too-cosy detective stories on one hand and obnoxious tough-guy vigilantes on the other.

Suburban Dicks has some similarities to Knives Out, with a slightly different mix of the ingredients of characters, plot, laughs, and social commentary. Briefly: Knives out was a more professional piece of work (we’ll get back to that in a moment) and had a much better plot, both in its underlying story and how it was delivered. The books were equally funny but in different ways: as one might guess from its title, Suburban Dicks was more slapstick, more of a Farrelly brothers production, in the book’s case leaning into the whole Jersey thing. Suburban Dicks was also more brute force in its social commentary, to the extent that it could put off some readers, but to me it worked, in the sense that this was the story the author wanted to tell.

Suburban Dicks works in large part because of the appealing characters and the shifting relationships between them, all of which are drawn a bit crudely but, again, with enough there to make it all work. I liked the shtick, and I liked that the characters had lives outside the plot of the story.

This all might sound like backhanded compliments, and I apologize for that, because I really enjoyed the book: it was fun to read, and I felt satisfied with it when it was all over. What’s most relevant to the experience, both during the reading and in retrospect, are the strengths, not the weaknesses.

One more thing, though. The book is well written, but every once in awhile there’s a passage that’s just off, to the extent that I wonder if the book had an editor. Here’s an example:

“Listen, I know what it sounds like, but, I don’t know, think of it this way,” Andrea said. “You were a child-psych major at Rutgers, right? And you got a job at Robert Wood Johnson as a family caseworker for kids in the pediatric care facility, right?”

“Yeah.”

Who talks that way? This is a classic blunder, to have character A tell character B something she already knows, just to inform the reader. I understand how this can happen—in an early draft. But it’s the job of an editor to fix this, no?

But then it struck me . . . nobody buys books! More books are published than ever before, but it’s cheap to publish a book. Sell a few thousand and you break even, I guess. (Maybe someone in comments can correct me here.) There’s not so much reading for entertainment any more, not compared to the pre-internet days. I’m guessing the economics in book publishing is that the money’s in the movie rights. So, from the publisher’s point of view, the reason for this book is not so much that it might sell 50,000 copies and make some money, but that they get part of the rights for the eventual filmed version (again, experts on publishing, feel free to correct me on this one). So, from that point of view, who cares if there are a few paragraphs that never got cleaned up? And, to be honest, those occasional slip-ups didn’t do much to diminish my reading experience. Seeing some uncorrected raw prose breaks the fourth wall a bit, but the book as a whole is pretty transparent; indeed, there’s a kind of charm to seeing the author as a regular guy who occasionally drops a turd of a paragraph.

It makes me sad that there was no editor to carefully read the book and point out the occasional lapses in continuity, but I can understand the economics of why the publisher didn’t bother. I’m sure the eventual movie script will be looked over more carefully.

In any case, let me say again that I enjoyed the book and I recommend it to many of you. After reading it, I googled the author’s name and found out that he writes for comic books, most famously creating the character Deadpool. His wikipedia page didn’t mention Suburban Dicks at all so I added something. And then, in preparing this post, I googled again and came across this article, “Legendary comic book writer’s first novel set in West Windsor,” from a Central New Jersey news site, from which I learned:

Suburban Dicks debuted to rave reviews and Nicieza has already been contracted to write a sequel. The book has also been optioned for a television show.

Good to hear.

Actually, this news article, by Bill Sanservino, is excellent. It includes a long and informative interview with Nicieza, interesting in its own right and also in the light it sheds on his book. It’s a long, long interview with lots of good stuff.

There’s only one thing that puzzles me. In the interview, Nicieza talks about all the editors who helped him on the book. That’s cool; there’s no need to do it all yourself. But how could there be all those editors . . . and none of them caught the paragraph quoted above, and a few others throughout the book, that just jumped out at me when I read them? I don’t get it.

21 thoughts on “Suburban Dicks

  1. Andrew –

    > Who talks that way? This is a classic blunder, to have character A tell character B something she already knows, just to inform the reader.

    Without knowing what comes next, this argument is not convincing. Sometimes telling someone what they already know is part of a rhetorical device for emphasis. Such as in:

    So you’re an expert in statistics, right? And as such you look at full context very carefully before reaching a conclusion, right? So then why would you include that passage without giving us more context?

    I’ll have to assume that this wasn’t a case of that kind of rhetorical framing, as otherwise you wouldn’t have made this point?

  2. Actually, I though the quoted line was hilarious! Not necessarily because a real person would talk that way, but because a comically exaggerated New Jerseyite would talk that way. The character probably practiced that line while getting her hair blown out at the salon. Seriously, name-dropping Rutgers AND RWJ in one sentence? What could be more Suburban Jersey than that?

  3. Joshua, Gec:

    I’ll just say that I read the whole book, and I liked it a lot, and lots of the dialogue was over-the-top in a funny way, so I’m not demanding straight naturalistic prose. But every once in awhile there was undigested exposition or something else that didn’t ring true. That paragraph was an example.

    • Raghu:

      That’s a funny story. I wouldn’t want fake authors all over the place—in general it does seem like a benefit to know something about the background of writers—but it’s good for it to happen on occasion, just to keep people on their toes.

    • “a regional branch of the Women’s Institute included Mola’s work as part of a selection of “feminist reading” alongside Canadian poet Margaret Atwood and Spanish writer Irene Vallejo.”

      Priceless.

  4. I have been told that in order to pitch a screenplay or series idea, it really helps to have been a book first. Apparently, the book doesn’t even have to sold any (auditable) copies, and the studio executives won’t ever read the book. So to sell the show, one guy went to the trouble of mocking up a graphic novel and pretending it was a big seller just to sell the studio on the idea.

  5. Well, the usual alternative to that dialogue is the classical Character Who Walks and Thinks or the Character Who Speaks to Himself, which appears in tons of books, and even in some classics. To replace it with dialogue, that’s a change. What about the classic description of the Narrator Who Looks in the Mirror. Wouldn’t it be better, if another character would tell him: “Look, you’re a tall blue-eyed, square-jawed man with a tendency to stoop? And, by the way, your name is John.”

  6. Wow. If you know Dave van Ronk, that either dates you or you are into older folk music. When he was in his heyday (I don’t know he ever achieved wide-spread fame but he was well-known in the folk music world and influenced a lot of other performers) the folk scene, particular in NYC, was incredible. People should look up all the musicians that were performing there at that time.

    One of my “claims to fame” is I was at the last performance at the the original Club 47 in Cambridge. Of course I was only 6 months old (just kidding but this really dates me).

    • Roy:

      I can’t speak for commenter David above, but I loved Inside Llewyn Davis. The Coen brothers, like Bob Zimmerman, grew up in Minnesota, but in more comfortable financial circumstances, as befits their generation.

      • Dave van Ronk’s widow was majorly pissed off at Llewyn Davis. It takes DvR’s story and glues it into a rather unpleasant person, twisting the meaning of each of the episodes.

        I’m sure that there were self-centered, focused-on success, backstab at every chance folk singers out there, but that wasn’t DvR. DvR was about the music, supporting fellow singers, teaching. Everyone loved him or was in awe of him or both. Usually both.

        The Coen brothers modus operandi seems to be to pick a subject who has gobs of flaws and minimal positive features and make brutal fun of them (with lovely dour humor). (Fargo, Lebowski) This makes for fun cinema. But it’s seriously inappropriate for a subject who really was a friggin saint, as DvR very much was.

        Roy: I confess to be guilty on that dated part: I grew up on Beacon Hill during the 60s. Caught the Velvet Underground Banana album tour Boston show (68?). But was mostly interested in acoustic stuff: John Renbourne, Tom Rush. Pete Cairo. (OK, I like rowdy too: Hot Tuna. Canned Heat.)

        • David:

          The difference is that I’d never heard of Ronk before seeing Inside Llewyn Davis. My takeaway from that movie was not that the Davis character was unpleasant, self-centered, etc. I took it as that he was an idealistic person with a lot of musical taste and talent who was also being squeezed economically and professionally. Sure, he was flawed and abused the kindness of his friends in a way that was positively Dylanesque, but a lot of that was a product of the imbalance between his grand ambitions and his precarious circumstances.

          I agree with you that the Coen brothers like to make fun of people. I guess that doesn’t bother me so much, given that I like to make fun of people too! This might not be one of my best character traits, but it can make for entertaining reading (on a much smaller scale than the Coens’ mocking inclinations can facilitate entertaining movies).

        • But that whole story is completely wrong for DvR. That’s not who he was: he wasn’t Dylan, he was supporting Dylan, he wasn’t Joni, he was supporting Joni. He _NEVER_ “abused the kindness of his friends”. Ever. Everyone who ever knew DvR says that over and over again.

          There’s a ton of ugliness in the music business that would have been fair game for the Cohens. DvR wasn’t any of that. So people who knew DvR are livid. And more so because most people who see that flick never get to figure that out. (Another problem is that a lot of the episodes in that flick are taken from things that sort of happened, but are twisted into the exact opposite of what really happened. Also, (according to DvR’s widow) it’s treatment of abortion in a period when abortion was the hideous problem it’s about to become again was problematic.)

        • David:

          To me, it’s ok that the Coens took some events from Ronk’s life and gave them to a new, invented character who had a mix of good and bad traits. But I could see how this could annoy Ronk’s family.

        • Long story but I once helped produce a show with Tom Rush and Bonnie Raitt. Not my connection, but if you want to find out their connection look up Dick Waterman.

  7. I don’t think nobody reads books. In fact, according to this – https://149389299.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image.png – from the AAP, while book revenue as a whole has generally been rending down, trade books are actually going up (and elsewhere they reported about 9% increase in 2020, which is hardly surprising). Revenue isn’t units, of course, but still.

    Anecdotally, I have always seen lots of people reading when I was commuting, and even some of the people on their phones are actually reading ebooks (God knows how).

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