Bomber's Law.

BOMBER'S LAW

George V. Higgins 

Henry Holt and Co., Inc. $22.50, 296 pp.

All fiction is gossip," according to crime novelist George V. Higgins, "and the best of it is collected by eavesdropping." That is certainly true of Higgins himself, an ex-federal attorney whose thuggish characters talk circles around the plots that would contain them. Ever since his first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, appeared in 1972, Higgins has been praised for his spectacularly vivid dialogue. And like his literary mentor John O'Hara, he resents the unspoken subtext of such praise: that he can do nothing else. Higgins occupies a curiously vertiginous spot on the literary spectrum. His fiction is too clever, his plots too spare to achieve the bestselling status of other good crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Scott Turow. Yet he will not venture far enough from the cops-and-robbers format to get the serious attention he hopes for. Unlike his more austere forebears in the genre, Higgins will neither apologize for his work (like Graham Greene, who labeled his detective novels "entertainments") nor disguise it as something akin to High Seriousness, as did Conrad. For some readers, weary of too many sprawling postmodern fictions, that kind of dogged fidelity to genre can be a virtue in itself. Higgins has always had a devoted following among literary tough-guys like Norman Mailer and David Mamet, and his latest book has provoked a new round of crusty, defensive praise. It is also his most sophisticated effort so far.

In Bomber's Law, a young detective, Harry Dell'Appa, discovers that his fellow detective and nemesis, Bob Brennan, has become curiously lax in his efforts to nail Short Joey Mossi, an aging Mafia hit man. Dell' Appa, who has been assigned to take over the Mossi case, begins to suspect that Brennan has gotten to know his subject a little too well-or rather, that he sympathizes too fully with Mossi. As the cops sit together in a cold car, waiting for Mossi to appear, Brennan talks on and on, digressing into stories about other criminals and about his own life. Dell' Appa listens fitfully, letting his mind wander in time to other conversations, and moving slowly toward an understanding of what Brennan and Mossi have been up to. The real substance of Bomber's Law lies not in its fairly straightforward plot but in this crossbraid of digression and flashback. The fabric becomes startlingly elaborate; at one point we watch Dell'Appa recall a conversation with Brennan in which Brennan, speaking (at length) in a voice of another detective, interrupts that narrative with the voice of still another speaker. These characters, for all their graft cynicism, are brilliant ventriloquists.

The detective's job--as many literary critics have observed--is like that of the reader: he or she must retrace the actions that constitute the plot and interpret them. This insight has bred countless "literary" detective novels; and in France (where the roman policier has always been taken more seriously) it influenced the development of the nouveau roman in the 1960s. In Bomber's Law this kind of selfconsciousness sometimes mars the otherwise magnificent dialogue. Surely most Boston cops do not quote or allude to Poe, Dickens, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Eliot, Byron, and Thomas Mann in the course of a day' s work. For the most part, however, Higgins sticks to a deeper and more homespun philosophy. The Law of the title, woven in and out of the book' s endless palaver, is "the simple explanation... for so many of the lousy things that everybody, even good guys, nice guys like you and me...always seem to end up doing." The explanation: "We did it for the money."

That homely truth, running like a thread through every Higgins novel, traces a more elliptical design than ever before in Bomber's Law. Higgins appears to be expanding his interests, pressing out against the limits of his genre. The detective novel is based, after all, on violence, and rooted in a Manichean world-order; pursuers and pursued. Now Higgins, whose work always played off the moral ambiguities in that schema, has written a book in which the cops pursue each other. They do so for reasons that have less to do with law and order than with that great crucible of narrative fiction: character. Crime and punishment recede in Bomber's Law into a mosaic of stories about human motive. At one point in the novel Dell'Appa and his boss Dennison argue about the role of suggestion in suffering. "Yeah," Dennison says, "maybe the worry-waves just go out and cause sympathetic anxiety-vibrations, tremors, that kind of thing, in cosmic milk, so you get whitecaps kicking up in the cereal bowl, washing your kannic Wheaties all over the sports section and the funmies while you're trying to read them." Passages like these bring out the best and the worst in Higgins. It' s easy to believe that his characters really talk like that. Still, one senses a kind of reactionary gruffness in the language, as though Higgins were expressing his own distrust of abstraction in the voice of his characters. When he ventures away from dialogue into narrative exposition he can be painfully clumsy. Perhaps that is why Higgins is so reluctant to take the next step, into a fiction where character would break free of any fixed formula. Bomber's Law is the work of a writer who has the power to stretch his genre to its limits, but who may never be able to break out of it.