I’ve previously enjoyed Andrew Gross’s pulpy thrillers, his WWII-set The One Man was a page turner, and his Saboteur worked (for the most part). We’re sadly not 3 for 3 in The Last Brother, Gross’s foray into the world of prohibition-era Jewish gangsters in New York. Though he’s ernest in his intentions and thorough in his research, Gross writes his characters’ dialogue as though the genre of gangster film was once described to him by someone who watched The Untouchables once, while in a bar, and the sound was off, and Gross wasn’t paying attention while it was being described to him.

It’s really appalling. Gross comes across as an ideas man, a writer of theme or setting. But The Last Brother may be one of the most poorly written novels I’ve come across in a long time. Each plot point is sign posted, the characters are poorly fleshed out and the dialogue is execrable.

Heck. While we’re at it, let’s hear some of the more pointed expository dialogue ever committed to the printed page.

“So then you know that to invoke federal antitrust laws, which is where I’m hoping you’ll see I’m heading, the racketeering activity must be of such a character as to restrain interstate commerce through the following: the creation of monopolies, through the acquisition or the merging of competing enterprises; the maintenance of monopoly status through the implementation of price fixing, the establishment of retail prices through agreements with jobbers and dealers. And lastly…”

That’s dialogue. Between two humans. In conversation. And the book is filled with it. You’d think Gross found the paragraph he was looking for online, cut and pasted it onto his screen and then inserted inverted commas around it. Look, Ma! No hands!

I could go on (Gross certainly does). How’s about a nice bit of historical context? The thing’s set in the 30s, so let’s make a comment that seems timely, given the …timeframe.

“You’ll put more Jews in the clink than I hear this guy Hitler’s doing back in Germany,” Morris snickered.

You see? Because of the holocaust? Such insight.

Then there’s the moment when Gross describes the adult twin arriving in heaven, being met by the little kid twin who dies in the first chapter. I’d say it was irksome.

But maybe the hack coup de grace comes near the book’s finale. Again, we’re dealing with someone who is writing about gangsters but has perhaps the most minute idea of what dialogue between gangsters should sound like. He might have done well to maybe watch a single episode of Boardwalk Empire. But that’s neither here nor there. So there’s a sequence near the end where the main character looks to become a victim of a mafia hit, wherein he’s to be dumped in the river. The hero, Morris, wants some information about his brother from one of the two crims. His fellow tough (Workman)… He ain’t so bright.

“Oh, go ahead and tell him, Mendy,” Workman said. ‘Who’s he gonna tell? The fish?”

So, Gross is clearly setting up a bit plot reveal and we know Morris is going to get out of this jam, because of that line (spoiler alert, he does). So the thing goes on, and then, at THE BOTTOM OF THE SAME PAGE, we get this line of dialogue, from THE SAME CHARACTER.

“Go on, Mendy, tell him.” Workman fed the length of a chain around Morris’s waist. “Who’s he going to blab it to anyway, the fucking carp?”

That line is on the bottom. Of the same page.

There’s no real bone to pick with general, pulpish fiction. One needs to whittle the hours away while on planes. But what grinds one’s gears is that this thing is all but screaming for an editor to say, “Um, shitty expository dialogue here, please rewrite.” And let’s not get into how it’s the middle of the night, and it and it’s pitch black dark, and there’s a fight in the river between Morris and Mendy. Where it’s pitch black, but there’s still detail about how wide Mendy’s eyes were bulging, what he was doing, what’s Morris was seeing.

In the pitch black darkness of the river. At night.

(By the way, this fight is happening, and our hero wins it, having suffered multiple gunshot and stab wounds, while wearing heavy clothing and wrapped with a heavy chain, under water in New York in the cold. It’s an astonishingly bad piece of writing.)

This type of thing angers up the blood, while actual writers of substance who write actually good books, who understand how human beings talk to each other, people who have stories to tell which further the cause of humanity – these people can’t get arrested in literary circles. Andrew Gross piggybacks on the success of James Patterson and dishes out annual literary farts like a vending machine. Truth be told I don’t know if I’m angry at Gross or his editors, who can commit this dribble to paper and then think nobody’s going to notice.

Hell, maybe nobody else did.

I did, though. You guys suck.

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