2.5 stars.Title this review, “The Time One of My Favorite Authors Wrote a Book I Didn’t Like Very Much.”It happens. R.E.M. gives us Around the Sun, Quentin Tarantino writes and directs Death Proof, Michael Fassbender appears in Jonah Hex. Even our most reliable artists stumble from time to time – it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise – and with any luck, they recover. That’s largely how I feel about Gold Coast, a book that seems to have something on its mind but doesn’t execute very well.The problem (and I’ll try to keep this short) is that in this book Leonard fails where he usually succeeds: his characters are, as the French would say, total merde. The book revolves around a spectacularly uninteresting trio consisting of widow Karen, cowboy-hat-wearing villain Roland, and wannabe good guy Maguire. And that’s unfortunate, because Gold Coast actually sports a killer premise. Karen’s ultra-possessive, mobbed-up husband Frank dies and leave her his estate in trust: a monthly payment of $20,000 which will eventually total $4 million. The catch is that his possessiveness stays behind to haunt her. If Karen dates anyone else – ever – she forfeits the money, and Frank facilitates the deal from beyond the grave by arranging for Roland to tap her phones and scare off any would-be suitors. This is where Maguire, a petty thief who decided to go straight by working at a low-rent Sea World knock-off, enters the picture. He falls for Karen – and she for him, sorta – and, after Karen learns of Frank’s scheme, the two of them cook up a plan by which they can get Roland out of the picture.It’s good, right? I mean, I don’t pretend to have enough legal savvy to know if Frank’s deal is plausible, but Leonard sells it. After the first couple chapters I was prepared for a typically entertaining ride from the master of this sort of thing. But, as I mentioned above, the three main characters are just … dull. Where Leonard’s characters are usually sharply and incisively drawn, here we get broad strokes that are supposed to pass for personality. Roland is a backwoods hick who wears a blue suit; Maguire is brash and idealistic; and Karen is, well, sort of a blank slate. In her defense (and Leonard’s, by extension), we learn at the very end of Gold Coast that that’s very much by design. But the problem is that the revelation in question (which I obviously won’t spoil here) doesn’t turn the book on its head like it should, so Karen just sort of remains a void. It’s unclear, then, why these two men are fighting over her other than the fact that she’s a 44-year-old woman with the body of a 25-year-old. On one hand that reveals some troubling gender politics; on the other hand, it’s not totally implausible that that would be enough for some men to drop everything and take up fisticuffs.Without well-defined characters on which to hang his trademark dialogue, Leonard’s plot spins its wheels aimlessly. Things gradually become more and more convoluted to the point where the book’s relatively scant 218 pages actually felt too long. I usually breeze through Leonard’s stuff in a day or two; this one I struggled with. As I’ve written in multiple reviews, I don’t need to relate to characters to enjoy a book, but I do need characters. To crib shamelessly from Luigi Pirandello, Gold Coast is a story in search of three characters.I know enough of Elmore Leonard’s career to know he recovers from this uncharacteristic lull (when Gold Coast was published, Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch were still out of there on the horizon ten or more years in the future), but this is easily the first of his books I can’t enthusiastically recommend.Read all my reviews at goldstarforrobotboy.net
So much fun. Right on page 9, what I love about Elmore: Karen, “Playing a role and enjoying it. It was real.”Or page 61, Maguire in a rant after my own heart: “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I said it wasn’t real. It’s like a refuge. Nothing can happen to you there, you’re safe. But it’s got nothing to do with reality. It’s like you’re given security, but in exchange for it you have to give up yourself. You have to become somebody else.”Getting it, even in the stories that are just pure fun, the playing roles and the false safeties, the way trouble is like an itch on your back you’ve got to scratch. Life is not a movie but also it is, only there’s just the one person in charge of casting and direction, Karen saying things to Maguire like “I think you were miscast. You should’ve been something else.”I don’t know what to tell you anymore, how much of a kick I get out of it, the story-ness of these stories, the thrashing around and the wrecking of normal life for one beautiful reason: because. McCarthy says, want only comfort and harmony and you’re the first to give up your soul. Barry Hannah says the sun gets up like bright hell, the sky just stupid and blue. That last one: I don’t know if there’s a better description of it, what Elmore’s characters are.I’m over here still reading Raylan for the third time and also Tishomingo Blues again, and so it’s just like what Robert Taylor thinks too, watching Jazz Age: “the man living every minute of his life till the way he’s living kills him. Beautiful.”Barry Hannah again, from the same story (“Taste Like A Sword,” High Lonesome): “Much of what I see reminds me of death but death is interesting, not just sitting there. It is red, green, and blue of dirt, pines, and sky, and it is moving around, my mother being nervous there at the window.”Moving around. Some days, getting up like bright hell. The way I loved this in the end, when all Karen wanted was the trouble, God love her, coming quietly alive.
What do You think about Gold Coast (2002)?
This is the first time I am reading a book from this author. There were so many characters in this story I had to write their names on a separate paper to keep them straight. When I did that I could see the story more clearly. I had no idea how this story was going to end. Would Karen ever be able to have a sex life again? How would this be enforced? Could the stipulations of her deceased husband get changed? Who was going to help her? Did she want help? Did she like her rich lonely life? I think she was bored and anyone who tried to help her would be disappointed. I expecting a different ending. The Karen I read from the beginning of the book evolved into a totally different person. She wanted to be like the dolphins.
—Linda Nonalaya
This is part of my Swampy's Florida book collection.Not sure why I had trouble connecting with this book. It does occur to me that I've had trouble connecting with characters in past Elmore Leonard books in the past. It was particularly difficult with this book. It could be that I've recently been reading books with very well drawn characters. These are well defined, but in the typical Leonard caricature that I struggled with. I should add there is one character that has a few levels that appear along the way.This is a 1980 book that set a tenor that got expanded further by Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey, amongst others. The wacky Florida mystery stories really began with Leonard and this is one of the first. The story sops up the south Florida lifestyle of the rich and famous and adds the contemporary dark characters with gusto. The story is good and this book is well written. Many today are likely to be dissatisfied with the ending but, as occurs in Leonard novels past the characters, the story has a unique ending.I'm chalking up my dissatisfaction with the characters with reading recent strong character driven novels and so the bottom line is: I recommend it.
—Rob Smith
Gold Coast by Elmore Leonard - Pretty standard Elmore Leonard. I've read several of his novels now and I don't think you can really go wrong with him. I thoroughly enjoyed this one from start to finish. It didn't quite jump out and grab me like some of his others did, but as far as I'm concerned it was a great read. I just learned upon finishing this that Elmore Leonard died just this August. I'm really disappointed to hear that. I'll definitely miss him. Fortunately there are so many more of his books for me to read yet.
—Frederick
