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Thoughts about Don Winslow's Cartel Trilogy
1. I initially called it his Border Trilogy, but then I remembered that name's already taken.
2. What Winslow has done in these books is impressive, in literary terms, and powerful, in terms of educating the reading public while also entertaining them. Little did he know when he began writing the first book nearly 20 years ago how relevant, and prescient, the topic of the drug war and its ever-widening social, moral, and political consequences would be.
3. Winslow is a gifted writer. His prose is propulsive, soaked in adrenaline and masculine energy, in all its creative and destructive forms. His control of tone, voice, character, cultural reference (popular and "high"), and biblical allusion is masterful. The complexity of his plots, the centripetal force drawing their far-flung lines of action to some center or centers of encounter and explosion (often literal), is enthralling. The man was born to do this.
4. The TV adaptation of the trilogy, on FX, is therefore going to be a blast to watch.
5. Having said all that... I found myself disappointed with The Border, and increasingly so as the book wore on. At over 700 pages, it brings the trilogy as a whole (following The Power of the Dog and The Cartel) to around 2,000 pages. In the end, the series makes for diminishing returns. I would recommend POTD to anyone, so long as they could stomach some intense, though realistic, violence and sex. The sequel was nearly as good, though the ending was a betrayal, in my view, and some of the flaws that would drag down the conclusion began to show up here. What are some of those flaws?
6. First, the sheer gratuity of the sex and violence becomes pornographic. It's superfluous, upsetting, and finally boring. Winslow, like so many genre artists, wants to have his cake and eat it too: to titillate readers then to indict them for it, given the who and the what and the how and the what-for of what's on the page. In other words, it's Truffaut's principle about war films applied to the drug war journo-novel: reveling in the glorious debauchery and hedonism of the money, power, fame, and pleasure that comes with the illegal drug trade only to reveal the nauseating rot that underwrites it all. There is (I believe) a way of showing the behavior and experiences of those who themselves revel in the extravagance made possible by drug trafficking without inviting readers to be voyeurs, to enjoy what they see, even if from afar. Call it the Goodfellas problem. However brilliant the third act, the first two acts of a story don't vanish into thin air once the bad guys get their comeuppance. Portray them as they feel in the moment (rather than as they are in lamentable fact), and you glorify The Life, whatever the consequences awaiting them down the line.
In short, I just got sick of it all. And I realized, whether it's Winslow or another genre author, I think I'm done with this sort of thing. It's just too much. Life's too short to have your nose rubbed in this wretchedness. Morally (and Winslow thinks his novels have a moral perspective), it's ugly; artistically, it's unnecessary and self-defeating.
7. The great temptation today is to make Relevant Art, where "relevant" means "speaking in terms that correspond directly and literally to the loudest and most public events on the American scene," and where "art" means "a vehicle for a thesis about said scene, didactically delivered, preferably reducible to a single statement about 'what it all means.'" Alas, Winslow has, with The Border, made Relevant Art.
8. How so? Well, Trump and his son-in-law and a Mueller stand-in all play central roles. You read that right. It's as bad as it sounds. Actually, it's worse.
Perhaps I shouldn't say "central." They aren't page-to-page speaking characters (though we do meet all of them face to face, as it were). But they're there on every page, whether as background, subtext, or pseudonym.
In fact, the climax of the narrative—I kid you not—has the protagonist of all three books, Art Keller, testifying before Congress (on and on and on he drones, with impressive, dizzying self-righteousness), the dramatic upshot of which concerns whether the Attorney General will appoint a Special Counsel. Winslow actually has his Trump stand-in, Dennison, fire Mueller-1, only for Keller's testimony to elicit a Mueller-2 to replace him. (Whoops: maybe should have delayed publication by a year or so...)
It dawned on me in the last 100 pages of the novel: I was reading Resistance Fan Fiction. A fever dream of anti-Trump Earth-2 wishful thinking. What an error in judgment.
9. Because Winslow views this Trilogy as educational entertainment, he also indulges himself with a C-plot that bears no relationship the rest of the story, except by the most indirect and least consequential reckoning, and even that in a terribly forced way. The plot tracks a 10-year old boy from the slums of Guatemala all the way north across the Texas border, through the immigration system once he's caught, into street crime in New York City, and finally in a wildly implausible intersection with three other (actual) characters. Why, you might ask, are we reading the tale of this boy, Nico? There's only one answer: to inform American readers What It's Like. What it's like, that is to say, to live in poverty in Latin America, to consider migrating to El Norte, to actually undertake the terribly dangerous journey, etc., etc., etc.
It's a Ripped From The Headlines Vox Explainer Piece, in novelized form. It does not work. It has no reason internal to the novel for its own existence. It exists because readers are wondering about such things, so Winslow will give it to them—even if it adds 150 pages to an already enormous book.
10. Last, Winslow already failed his lead character, Keller, in the finale of The Cartel, and The Border only extends the problem. I won't elaborate on the plot details, only to say that what makes the Trilogy work, when it does, is its willingness to let the tragic realities of the drug war bear, without sentimental qualification, on the lives and psyches of its fictional characters. But there's one, 2,000-page exception to this rule: the hero. He is insulated from it all, as if he has a force field protecting him—not just from bullets, but from any and all other consequences of his and others' actions. Divine providence (i.e., Don Winslow) just can't let Keller take a fall. Though he doesn't ride into the sunset, he does see one, looking across the border with his wife, on the final page of the book. They need a cane and a walker, respectively, to make it down the hill on their newly purchased land—but they're there, and it's theirs.
This is the same man who commits perjury before Congress and murders a man in cold blood, in addition to all the other extralegal and immoral and morally gray actions he commits across four decades for the simple reason (which Winslow has him earnestly report) that he's a "patriot." This is a man who makes a deal with the devil then, at the end of book 2, gets to shoot the devil twice in the face before walking out of the jungle, and taking a flight home to see his love.
The problem isn't that Keller "needs" to be "punished." It isn't that he lives. It's that the rules of the story that Winslow sets up from the beginning, and consistently lets play out in the lives of his characters up to the end, do not apply to the man at the center. It doesn't help that when Keller gets to speechifying in front of Congress, it reads like Winslow's (actual, not hypothetical) op-eds in favor of legalizing all drugs, ending mandatory minimums, so on and so forth. Fictional heroes usually embody their creators' aspirations for themselves, but in this case the self-projected myth-making goes so far as to undermine everything that made the story worth reading, and telling, in the first place.
2. What Winslow has done in these books is impressive, in literary terms, and powerful, in terms of educating the reading public while also entertaining them. Little did he know when he began writing the first book nearly 20 years ago how relevant, and prescient, the topic of the drug war and its ever-widening social, moral, and political consequences would be.
3. Winslow is a gifted writer. His prose is propulsive, soaked in adrenaline and masculine energy, in all its creative and destructive forms. His control of tone, voice, character, cultural reference (popular and "high"), and biblical allusion is masterful. The complexity of his plots, the centripetal force drawing their far-flung lines of action to some center or centers of encounter and explosion (often literal), is enthralling. The man was born to do this.
4. The TV adaptation of the trilogy, on FX, is therefore going to be a blast to watch.
5. Having said all that... I found myself disappointed with The Border, and increasingly so as the book wore on. At over 700 pages, it brings the trilogy as a whole (following The Power of the Dog and The Cartel) to around 2,000 pages. In the end, the series makes for diminishing returns. I would recommend POTD to anyone, so long as they could stomach some intense, though realistic, violence and sex. The sequel was nearly as good, though the ending was a betrayal, in my view, and some of the flaws that would drag down the conclusion began to show up here. What are some of those flaws?6. First, the sheer gratuity of the sex and violence becomes pornographic. It's superfluous, upsetting, and finally boring. Winslow, like so many genre artists, wants to have his cake and eat it too: to titillate readers then to indict them for it, given the who and the what and the how and the what-for of what's on the page. In other words, it's Truffaut's principle about war films applied to the drug war journo-novel: reveling in the glorious debauchery and hedonism of the money, power, fame, and pleasure that comes with the illegal drug trade only to reveal the nauseating rot that underwrites it all. There is (I believe) a way of showing the behavior and experiences of those who themselves revel in the extravagance made possible by drug trafficking without inviting readers to be voyeurs, to enjoy what they see, even if from afar. Call it the Goodfellas problem. However brilliant the third act, the first two acts of a story don't vanish into thin air once the bad guys get their comeuppance. Portray them as they feel in the moment (rather than as they are in lamentable fact), and you glorify The Life, whatever the consequences awaiting them down the line.
In short, I just got sick of it all. And I realized, whether it's Winslow or another genre author, I think I'm done with this sort of thing. It's just too much. Life's too short to have your nose rubbed in this wretchedness. Morally (and Winslow thinks his novels have a moral perspective), it's ugly; artistically, it's unnecessary and self-defeating.
7. The great temptation today is to make Relevant Art, where "relevant" means "speaking in terms that correspond directly and literally to the loudest and most public events on the American scene," and where "art" means "a vehicle for a thesis about said scene, didactically delivered, preferably reducible to a single statement about 'what it all means.'" Alas, Winslow has, with The Border, made Relevant Art.
8. How so? Well, Trump and his son-in-law and a Mueller stand-in all play central roles. You read that right. It's as bad as it sounds. Actually, it's worse.
Perhaps I shouldn't say "central." They aren't page-to-page speaking characters (though we do meet all of them face to face, as it were). But they're there on every page, whether as background, subtext, or pseudonym.
In fact, the climax of the narrative—I kid you not—has the protagonist of all three books, Art Keller, testifying before Congress (on and on and on he drones, with impressive, dizzying self-righteousness), the dramatic upshot of which concerns whether the Attorney General will appoint a Special Counsel. Winslow actually has his Trump stand-in, Dennison, fire Mueller-1, only for Keller's testimony to elicit a Mueller-2 to replace him. (Whoops: maybe should have delayed publication by a year or so...)
It dawned on me in the last 100 pages of the novel: I was reading Resistance Fan Fiction. A fever dream of anti-Trump Earth-2 wishful thinking. What an error in judgment.
9. Because Winslow views this Trilogy as educational entertainment, he also indulges himself with a C-plot that bears no relationship the rest of the story, except by the most indirect and least consequential reckoning, and even that in a terribly forced way. The plot tracks a 10-year old boy from the slums of Guatemala all the way north across the Texas border, through the immigration system once he's caught, into street crime in New York City, and finally in a wildly implausible intersection with three other (actual) characters. Why, you might ask, are we reading the tale of this boy, Nico? There's only one answer: to inform American readers What It's Like. What it's like, that is to say, to live in poverty in Latin America, to consider migrating to El Norte, to actually undertake the terribly dangerous journey, etc., etc., etc.
It's a Ripped From The Headlines Vox Explainer Piece, in novelized form. It does not work. It has no reason internal to the novel for its own existence. It exists because readers are wondering about such things, so Winslow will give it to them—even if it adds 150 pages to an already enormous book.
10. Last, Winslow already failed his lead character, Keller, in the finale of The Cartel, and The Border only extends the problem. I won't elaborate on the plot details, only to say that what makes the Trilogy work, when it does, is its willingness to let the tragic realities of the drug war bear, without sentimental qualification, on the lives and psyches of its fictional characters. But there's one, 2,000-page exception to this rule: the hero. He is insulated from it all, as if he has a force field protecting him—not just from bullets, but from any and all other consequences of his and others' actions. Divine providence (i.e., Don Winslow) just can't let Keller take a fall. Though he doesn't ride into the sunset, he does see one, looking across the border with his wife, on the final page of the book. They need a cane and a walker, respectively, to make it down the hill on their newly purchased land—but they're there, and it's theirs.
This is the same man who commits perjury before Congress and murders a man in cold blood, in addition to all the other extralegal and immoral and morally gray actions he commits across four decades for the simple reason (which Winslow has him earnestly report) that he's a "patriot." This is a man who makes a deal with the devil then, at the end of book 2, gets to shoot the devil twice in the face before walking out of the jungle, and taking a flight home to see his love.
The problem isn't that Keller "needs" to be "punished." It isn't that he lives. It's that the rules of the story that Winslow sets up from the beginning, and consistently lets play out in the lives of his characters up to the end, do not apply to the man at the center. It doesn't help that when Keller gets to speechifying in front of Congress, it reads like Winslow's (actual, not hypothetical) op-eds in favor of legalizing all drugs, ending mandatory minimums, so on and so forth. Fictional heroes usually embody their creators' aspirations for themselves, but in this case the self-projected myth-making goes so far as to undermine everything that made the story worth reading, and telling, in the first place.