From First To Last
A (Long) Review of Gorky Park
“All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling.”
So begins one of the most arresting novels I’ve read in some time, Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 thriller Gorky Park. The more I read the more I wanted to write every thought I had about it. Here goes.
I first heard of the book a few years ago. I can’t remember the article, I can’t remember the source, but in my sophomore (?) year of college I read something online, by a writer, that said, in so many words, “Well, the rest of us can’t hope to write the greatest first line possible, because that honor is already held by Gorky Park.” Interested, I googled it, spelling “Gorky” wrong, until I found the opening line above. I wanted to be unimpressed, to show how cool I am, and I was, but that, of course, was when I was young and stupid.
I forgot all about it. Then, six months ago, at a rummage sale, I saw perhaps the most dog-eared copy of Gorky Park in existence, on sale for twenty-five cents. With no other knowledge of the book save the recollection of that article I’d read years previously, I bought the beat-up book and let it sit on my shelf for months before I got around to it. Then I read the first sentence again, in the book itself, and knew I was in for a ride. Having finished it, and thought about it for a few weeks, I can safely say that was one of the best quarters I’ve ever spent.
Read that sentence again, pausing with the commas. Read it out loud, it sounds even better. It is, in my estimation, a top five opening line of any book ever written by a human being.* Three perfect phrases in parallel construction without being repetitive, three beautifully stressed-unstressed constructions that land like a bomb at the top of page one. It is also its own paragraph, so your brain rests for a moment after you’ve read it.
Okay, you’re saying, so Gorky Park has a Hall of Fame opening line, but the book is 435 pages—what about the rest of it? Well, I’ll get to that, but I need to back up again. I should make it clear now that Gorky Park is a thriller. It is not what is known as “literary fiction,” the pretentious term for any and all literature that is not easily classified into the categories of mystery/western/detective/fantasty/sci-fi/romance/etc. Literary fiction is the stuff that wins prizes and what, since I read Catch-22 when I was 16, I have almost exclusively preferred. Genre fiction—Patterson, Harry Potter, Danielle Steele—is, though widely popular and essential to the publishing industry’s survival, not taken seriously by the literati. Think Marvel movies (genre) vs the films that win Oscars (literary).
With me so far? Let’s keep going on this book-division dichotomy. Literary fiction is generally considered to be all serious literature, from Ulysses to American Pastoral to War and Peace. By “serious,” though, I don’t necessarily mean that the book itself is serious and dry and dense and solemn. Most of my favorite literary fiction, in fact, is satire, or at least some form of comedy. Gravity’s Rainbow, a gleefully zany dense mess of a book, is without question literary fiction. Remember, literary fiction is just the stuff you can’t easily place into one of the accepted genres.
Most crucially, not all literary fiction is good, and not all genre fiction is bad. There are countless “literary” novels, including plenty of award-winning ones, that are awful, and there is some genre fiction that is truly compelling. Which brings us to Gorky Park.
Gorky Park is, at its heart, and marketed as such, a detective/mystery/thriller. So, classic genre fiction. But it is good in the same way The Dark Knight is good: it completely transcends the boundaries of its genre into something far superior to even a lot of literary fiction. The Dark Knight is a superhero movie that’s better than most of the last ten Best Picture winners; so too with Gorky Park being more entertaining, more captivating, more accomplished, more “literary” than who knows how many Pulitzers and Bookers.
Okay. How?
Let’s start with the characters. Fiction is driven by a simple formula: character + motivation + obstacle = conflict = motion. That is, Character A has a goal, and something stands in the way of that goal, and their efforts to overcome the obstacle and reach their goal, and whether or not they succeed, is what actually makes a story. Literary fiction is good at this, often eschewing plot for deep character studies, sometimes taking place entirely within a character’s mind. Genre fiction is usually much more simplistic in their characterizations: obvious good guy, obvious bad guy; guy wants girl, girl wants guy; chiseled cowboy vs. greedy bandits, etc.
Gorky Park says okay, genre fiction, we see you, we hear you, but we’re going to make complex characters that are actually like real people. There are no less than a dozen major characters in the book, each with a completely unique, completely compelling set of motivations, a specific set of obstacles that stand in the way of those goals, and an individualized method of overcoming those obstacles. In other words: each character in Gorky Park is actually a person. There are no tropes. These people have all the human contradictions, flaws, good and evil tendencies that we all have. For example: our “hero,” Moscow chief investigator Arkady Renko, makes a great number of unlikable decisions for complex reasons all his own, occasionally treats people with contempt and cruelty, and must overcome his own prejudices to achieve any sort of redemption. Our “villain,” American fur dealer John Osborne, makes completely understandable decisions to satiate his greed, speaks eloquently on why he and Arkady should not be opposed to one another, and sticks it to the FBI just because he can. Other major players—a jaded, brutal NYPD detective; a scheming, corrupt Moscow prosecutor; a female Siberian dissident; Arkady’s slovenly Stalinist World War II-hero general father—were clearly created with the same level of care. In my experience, this level of character depth in genre fiction is unique.
Take Renko. He’s smart without being brilliant, jaded without being suicidal, and justice-driven without being an insufferable do-gooder; thus, a complicated, non-stereotyped Cold War Russian. Cold War Russians, of course, usually serve as 1) villains, 2) henchmen, 3) thugs, 4) dumb brutes, 5) overly scheming pricks, 6) nuclear-thirsty bureaucrats, or 7) some combination of these. Renko is not any of these, which makes him, if not likable, then at least rootable. He makes the whole thing tick, and he finds out things when the reader does. Fiction has three levels of information: author—character—reader, and only the first knows everything from the beginning. How the writer manages the levels of the other two often determines whether a book “works,” especially for detective/mystery stories. Give the reader too much information while the characters stumble around and he’ll feel bored with nothing to solve, but keep the reader too in the dark and he’ll be frustrated and possibly turned off altogether. Smith keeps the tension up by aligning the reader with his protagonist, and details and clues to the book’s central puzzle are laid out in regular, lurid, precise fashion, enough to keep us satisfied while still wanting more. This book’s engine has several sources of power, and the plot’s self-propelling mysteries, encountered and solved by Renko, is a big one.
And so—the plot. Brilliant, but why? Because it is enormously complex without being unnecessarily so. The complexity only arises from the clashing interests of the characters, not from—as is the usual case in genre fiction—the author’s attempting to make the book interesting. At no point does it feel too complex, because there is ample breathing room for each revelation, each scene. Nothing is rushed; a plot this complicated needs to be paced perfectly to work, and that’s what we get here. Smith has engineered his characters so thoroughly that the plot arises as if by association with them, not the other way around. That, funnily enough, is a hallmark of literary fiction (called “character-driven” for a reason). Smith’s plot just cranks up the intensity and intrigue to almost unbearable levels; I won’t go into too much detail, as discovering it as you go is a tremendous joy, but it involves a triple murder, Siberian fur trappers, dense Moscow underworld politics, trans-Atlantic Cold War relations, near-constant danger and pressure both psychological and physical on all parties, and lots of Renko driving around in beat-up Soviet cars trying to fit it all together. Totally captivating, and totally original.
The plot also wouldn’t work without the relentless perfection of the setting. Smith must have done a lot of research to make Moscow come alive like this—he offers an enormous number of world-building details so small, fleeting, yet utterly unique that they must be true. For example: Renko goes to a used auto lot in the Moscow outskirts, and groups of men move among the cars trying to sell him windshield wipers from bags. This, though something the reader does not know about Soviet Russia, fits so perfectly with what Soviet Russia must have been that it is almost certainly based on fact. These details are never labored over; they simply occur, as part of the book’s endlessly evocative scenery. That’s what the novel feels like: a movie. You can see everything that goes on, because Smith tells you what everything looks like, and feels like (not a spoiler: Moscow is cold), and sounds like. This book is cinematic, with every scene, every setting, described in the utmost economy of words before any events happen. One could very, very easily imagine this as a Netflix miniseries, especially as there are clear subdivisions of the plot—episodes, if you will.
Furthermore, Smith somehow must have got his hands on information detailing the precise inner workings of Moscow bureaucratic infighting, Russian governmental power subdivisions, and every facet of Communist Party intrigue. The characters seem to be operating under a totally alien set of rules until you realize they’re simply acting like Russians. They think differently than us not because they’re artificial characters, but because they’re totally authentic Soviets. This lends the book even more cinematic qualities, as the characters’ decisions take on whole new levels of meaning once the reader discovers how faithful to the truth Smith is. When Renko is led by the chief prosecutor to the power brokers’ underground bathhouse, you can just feel that something like this not only exists but operates exactly as described. That sense is woven into the fabric of every page.
A side note on this theme: the real villain of this book, it seems, is the mega police-state of the Cold War, and the institutional corruption of both American and Soviet governments. Smith’s portrayal of the hidden brutalities of the late 70s is, on some level, a scathing indictment of unchecked economic and military brinksmanship. The people of this book are ruled by their governments’ opposition, even though the Russians and the Americans have more in common than either of them realize; they don’t have to be at odds, Smith is saying. They were made this way, by the long arcs of the KGB and the FBI, nuclear weapons, and limitless lust for money and power and jealous secrecy at the highest levels. It was satisfying to see Arkady complete his arc, but—spoilers—he has to kill Osborne to do it, and you get the sense that it hurts him, Smith (and me) to watch the American die. What exactly that arc is, and the exact circumstances of its conclusion, are so well conceived and executed that Dickens could take notes from this.
The last major area of praise I have concerns the language. Most books are either 1) ripe with gorgeous language, or 2) concerned with effective, rather than beautiful, prose. The best literary fiction does both of these (read any Don DeLillo novel, for example, to learn what words can do), but genre fiction is always in the second category. (Indeed, most genre fiction is written really badly at the syntactical level; Harold Bloom called Stephen King “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book level.”) Except for Gorky Park. I’ve discussed the impossibly sexy first sentence above, but that’s not the only banger. In fact, on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph level, Smith is far above the average writer, among all writers. Some of the sentences in this book—remember, a Cold War thriller!—made me stop in wonder and awe. There is some absolutely killer language here, without ever sacrificing the book’s ruthless efficiency and clarity in telling its story. The characters also philosophize about the nature of American-Soviet relations, life, death, greed, and a host of other topics with real profundity, real wit, and real pathos without ever getting preachy or wordy. Stephen King, listen closely. (A quick aside: the best sentence of the book is the first, but the second-best is the very last.**)
So from first page to last, this book kicks incredible ass in so many ways, and what I really want to stress is almost never seen in any fiction, literary or genre, is the stunning professionalism throughout. This book is competent with supreme skill. By that I mean that from first page to last, it is readily apparent that Smith sweated over every word, every scene, every comma. Every sentence has been weighed, every paragraph has been adjudicated, every scene has been scrutinized, to ensure that maximum impact and clarity is imparted at every moment. When I learned it took him eight years to write, that all suddenly fell into place for me—this kind of impossibly sharp storytelling only comes through extensive and ruthless editing and revision. There is simply no way to write this well on the first try. Think about it this way: for any given sentence there are a million ways to phrase it, a million synonyms to put in. And then think of plotting: how many possible events can be in a book, and in how many orders—suddenly the equation exponentially explodes. Smith, it is clear, examined every possibility, then chose what in his view was the absolute best. On a sentence level, in my view he did this with stunning accuracy, picking the ideal sentence construction perhaps 85% of the time, an astonishingly high number even for literary fiction. To put it another way: there is almost no fluff in this book, almost no wasted words, maybe 10 unnecessary pages out of 435. Sure, some reviews online complain about the book being overly long. Don’t let them fool you. Everything in here is in here for a reason in Smith’s eyes, and the clarity and consistency of his vision is truly a monumental achievement.
Gorky Park is good writing, plain and simple, and to paraphrase disgraced NBA announcer Grant Napear, “If you don’t like this, you don’t like books!”
Postscript: I pretty much take it for granted that I love to read. As long as I can remember, it has simply been a given for me and my brain that I’ll have a book going, and will read from it every single day until it’s finished, at which point I’ll start another. I don’t question that fact, I don’t think about it actively, I just know, somewhere deep, deep in who I am, that reading is one of the greatest pleasures I have ever known, as much a part of me as my limbs, as essential to my life as oxygen. The content matters, yes (I will and have argued passionately for why some books are better or worse than others), but really it is the act of reading itself, regardless of material, that I have always loved—i.e., even if I hate a book, I still enjoy the intellectual and physical act of reading it. And every so often I read something that offers clarity to why that’s the case, why I love to read so much, why I’ve spent twenty sentient years with a book in my hands. Gorky Park is one of those books. It sat up, looked me square in the eyes, and said, very simply, “This is what makes sense to you.” Books, I re-learned, as I have over and over for two decades now, can reach down inside you and seize some essential part of yourself, permanently changing your emotional/moral/psychological DNA. Gorky Park didn’t let go, and like all my favorite books, I know it never will.
* My personal top five opening lines, of all books ever, in order:
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson: “We were somewhere near Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” (This book also holds my “best first paragraph” title too.)
2. Libra by Don DeLillo: “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.” (“He” is Lee Harvey Oswald)
3. Gorky Park
4. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis: “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.”
5. Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth: “Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.”
** No, I won’t tell you what the last sentence is. Guess you’ll have to read the book for yourself.
