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Crumbtown
By Joe Connelly
Knopf, 260 pp., $22.95

By Bill Beuttler (Boston Globe, June 22, 2003)

Joe Connelly debuted as an author five years ago with ''Bringing Out the Dead,'' an impressive first novel whose bleak realism was informed by Connelly's having spent nine years working as a New York City paramedic. ''Bringing Out the Dead'' established his strengths as a writer - his keen eye for detail, his empathy, his flashes of poetry and dark humor. But what really set it apart from the self-absorption of so many contemporary novels was Connelly's intimate knowledge of an underexamined corner of big-city life of real interest to other people. Paramedics who read it vouched for the novel's authenticity, and Hollywood even made it into a movie, starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Martin Scorsese.

And now for something completely different: satire. Connelly's second novel, ''Crumbtown,'' is a playful romp poking fun at how television exploits lower-class losers on reality cop shows like Fox's longtime hit ''Cops.'' If that sounds mean-spirited, it isn't. The exploiters come in for the worst of Connelly's ridicule and abuse, and the losers themselves are usually all too eager to be exploited whenever there's a corrupt buck in it for them. Besides, with a couple of exceptions the characters are too deliberately cartoonlike to generate much sympathy.

Connelly has plopped his protagonist not in New York or some other actual town but in the slummy Crumbtown section of the fictional Northeastern port city of Dodgeville. In Crumbtown, the street names themselves are comically bleak: Lemmings, Leak, Locust, Thorn, Sodden, Dyre, Haight. The only memorable references to a real place in the book all occur in a barroom, where the main characters seek refuge after absconding with $50,000 in real money from the set of a TV bank heist. Everyone seems to connect his personal misfortunes to those of a baseball team as plagued by bad luck as the denizens of Crumbtown.

''`I crashed my father's car the night we lost the tiebreaker,' Tom said. `Nineteen seventy-eight. I was in the hospital for eight weeks.'

''`My wife stopped talking to me after '86,' said another man, his face riddled with toothpicks. `Up by two runs in the bottom of the ninth. One out left to win the whole thing. Hasn't said a word to me in fifteen years.'

''`It ain't like the old days, though,' said the old man at the bar's end, his hat cleaned of all color. `My father died after the impossible-dream season, '67. Heart attack in the last game of the series, after they lost to Gibson the third time. Survived Guadalcanal, and the goddamn Red Sox killed him.'''

That interlude aside, Crumbtown is an unreal city. Ditto the people who populate it, who tend toward one-dimensionality and cliche: the twins Tom and Tim Dwight, who ran out on Don Reedy in the bank robbery 15 years earlier on which the aforementioned TV bank heist was based and nonetheless join forces with him on this new caper. Harry Hammamann, the bought cop who pines for Tim's wife and is willing to murder Tim to win her. Little Eddy, the grown- and coked-up ex-child actor who wants not just to play Don but actually be him. Dyan Swaine, the soap-opera castoff who prevails on sleazy producer Brian Halo to bully the sad-sack writer-director into awful script changes. Some of them have amusing comic quirks - Tom, for instance, displays a great knack for driving a getaway car in reverse. But only Don himself is fleshed out much as a character.

Don is an unusual felon. He often seems less motivated by money than the desire to defy his fate. His first criminal conviction as a teenager was for stealing cars from the upscale neighborhoods of Padlocked Hills and Snob Gardens, not to keep or fence them but to make their owners ''feel more chosen'' by their bad luck, ''the way Don felt every morning when he looked out his uncle's window'' after his mother's death. He'd disassemble the dashboards and install an empty sardine can behind the radio, or loose marbles behind the glove compartment, then sneak the cars back to their driveways before their owners realized they were missing.

A similar impulse is involved in the botched bank job that lands Don a lengthy prison term, nearly gets him killed, and becomes the basis for the TV show that he and his cohorts rob, only to have the ensuing chase get turned into reality TV. Don had taken to tossing out handfuls of bills to the crowds as an escape tactic in a series of bank robberies, began turning into a folk hero, and got crosswise with his boss for doing so. ''Maury told him to stop playing Robin Hood, said it was a waste of escape, it wasn't respectful. Don didn't want to stop, didn't think it was that important. One of those things that make the outside of prison different from in.''

Don is let out of prison to consult on the TV version of the robbery, but this goes immediately awry. He proves incapable of mastering the cellphone he is obliged to answer within two rings as a condition of his parole, and he more or less accidentally stumbles into possession of several handguns mere hours into his release.

Soon all hell is breaking loose, and lively and entertaining hell it is. There's lots of action, a little violence (a few fatal and nonfatal shootings, bad things befalling cameramen), and more than enough laughs to keep a reader turning pages. And the fun of guessing what sort of book, serious or satirical, Connelly's third novel will be.

Bill Beuttler is a former senior editor of Men's Journal and Boston Magazine.

© Bill Beuttler