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Romancing the stone for a deal
By Tom McCarthy |
May 17, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THERE'S a scene in "How to Sell," Clancy Martin's novel about sly, double-dealing jewelers and their scams, in which the hero's brother, fired up on cocaine and sheer ambition, passes off a used Rolex watch as new.
A lady has brought it in for tweaking: he has it cleaned off and placed it in a pristine, if fake, Rolex box with all the accoutrements (oyster artwork, hanging tag and crown), then gives it to a prospective buyer to sweeten a much bigger sale, an alexandrite necklace priced at almost half a million.
The buyer, none the wiser, not least because of the Macallan he's being plied (the regular, off-the-shelf stuff, not the 30-year-old version he thinks he's getting), succumbs, and perfidy triumphs as the deal goes through.
Publishers are like jewelers: they know the importance of packaging. This book, Martin's first, comes decked in the best tags imaginable. There are cover blurbs from stellar names like Benjamin Kunkel, who ascribes to it the "inevitability of the classic," and Jonathan Franzen, who calls it "greatly original."
Maybe I hadn't drunk enough whiskey when I popped the box, but this second quotation started alarm bells ringing. Takedowns of the national dream through parables of fraudulence and overreaching aspiration are staples of American fiction: that's the subject of "The Great Gatsby" - or, to cut even closer to the stone of Martin's subject, of Fitzgerald's shorter "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."
These themes are staples of European literature in which, just as in Martin's book, ostentation, speculation and desire waltz around one another, eventually coalescing in a piece of jewelry, a ring whose trading represents dissimulation and betrayal.
"How to Sell" is certainly well written - indeed, very well written. The dialogue, between dealers and the regulars they cheat even more avidly than they do first-timers (payback for the skinny-margin deals they hooked them in on), or between siblings who swive each other's girlfriends in the full knowledge that the other knows but not sure whether they know they know, is zippy.
The descriptions - of the in-store craftsmen's benches, polishing wheels and "deft, pretty torch-work," or the salesroom's almost religious atmosphere in which Muzak and excited voices blend like an angelic choir, halogens brighten and the air grows golden - are executed with no less manual and verbal dexterity than that of the book's fine-fingered and silver-tongued main characters.
The central narrative is engaging, a straightforward coming-of-age story that sees the high school dropout Bobby taken under the corrupted and corrupting wing of his older brother, Jim, as the two of them struggle for the affection of the jewelry-saleswoman-turned whore-with-a-heart-of-gold Lisa. All in all, it's a winning combination. "How to Sell" will sell.
A lady has brought it in for tweaking: he has it cleaned off and placed it in a pristine, if fake, Rolex box with all the accoutrements (oyster artwork, hanging tag and crown), then gives it to a prospective buyer to sweeten a much bigger sale, an alexandrite necklace priced at almost half a million.
The buyer, none the wiser, not least because of the Macallan he's being plied (the regular, off-the-shelf stuff, not the 30-year-old version he thinks he's getting), succumbs, and perfidy triumphs as the deal goes through.
Publishers are like jewelers: they know the importance of packaging. This book, Martin's first, comes decked in the best tags imaginable. There are cover blurbs from stellar names like Benjamin Kunkel, who ascribes to it the "inevitability of the classic," and Jonathan Franzen, who calls it "greatly original."
Maybe I hadn't drunk enough whiskey when I popped the box, but this second quotation started alarm bells ringing. Takedowns of the national dream through parables of fraudulence and overreaching aspiration are staples of American fiction: that's the subject of "The Great Gatsby" - or, to cut even closer to the stone of Martin's subject, of Fitzgerald's shorter "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."
These themes are staples of European literature in which, just as in Martin's book, ostentation, speculation and desire waltz around one another, eventually coalescing in a piece of jewelry, a ring whose trading represents dissimulation and betrayal.
"How to Sell" is certainly well written - indeed, very well written. The dialogue, between dealers and the regulars they cheat even more avidly than they do first-timers (payback for the skinny-margin deals they hooked them in on), or between siblings who swive each other's girlfriends in the full knowledge that the other knows but not sure whether they know they know, is zippy.
The descriptions - of the in-store craftsmen's benches, polishing wheels and "deft, pretty torch-work," or the salesroom's almost religious atmosphere in which Muzak and excited voices blend like an angelic choir, halogens brighten and the air grows golden - are executed with no less manual and verbal dexterity than that of the book's fine-fingered and silver-tongued main characters.
The central narrative is engaging, a straightforward coming-of-age story that sees the high school dropout Bobby taken under the corrupted and corrupting wing of his older brother, Jim, as the two of them struggle for the affection of the jewelry-saleswoman-turned whore-with-a-heart-of-gold Lisa. All in all, it's a winning combination. "How to Sell" will sell.
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