Born Slippy (2019) by Tom Lutz

1001 Novels: A Library of America 

Born Slippy (2019)

 by Tom Lutz 

Frizzell Hill Road, Leyden, Massachusetts

Massachusetts:  2/30

    Nice to read a book on the 1001 Novels list that isn't about a depressed teenage girl living in semi-rural New England.  Instead Born Slippy is about Frank (Everyone calls him Franky), a young contractor from Connecticut working on a spec house in the Berkshires.  He is convinced to hire Dmitry Heald, a young man from Liverpool looking for casual work in America in the summer before uni.   Although Frank is the narrator, Dmitry is the star of Born Slippy, which is titled after Dmitry's favorite song.   Since I'm a fan of the show Barry, it was almost impossible to imagine Dmitry as anyone other than Anthony "Noho Hank" Carrigan- who is actually from Massachusetts.   If you've seen the show and read the book I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.  In fact if Anthony Carrigan or one of his people is reading this they should go and option the book for a movie version starring Carrigan as Dmitry.

   Fan though I am of gender equity in my reading it was also nice to read such an aggressively masculine book- just as a change for all the depressed ladies that seem to swamp New England area lit.    Frank tracks backwards and forward in time till we get to the present of the last act: Frank, a succesful Los Angeles area builder of sound proof studios for the Hollywood elite, and Dmitry, a shadowy money launderer married to an Indonesian beauty.  At some point, Dmitry uses Frank's identification to open up a couple of bank accounts which sets up the action of the final act.

Author Lutz is also the founder of the Los Angeles Review of Books and the large portions of the story set in Los Angeles rang obviously true, down to his description of a relationship between a forty something contractor and a twenty something Angeleno.   Lutz also does not stint on the sexual pathology of Dmitry, which is described in sometimes exhaustive detail (to his credit, every female character in the book admits that Dmitry is a handful).  I'd expect to find him on the 1001 Novels list because editor Susan Straight is also an English Professor at UC Riverside, where Lutz is a tenured English Professor, so they must know one another.

  I thought Lutz didn't quite nail the psychology of Dmitry, since he turns into one of those "getting out before I'm 35" type of rich guys that don't comport with my personal experience with highly driven, succesful individuals.  They do not want to "get out" after "one last score," that is the attitude of losers and failures.  But the plot wouldn't work without his specific motivation, so all and all Lutz makes Born Slippy an enjoyable lark.