Los Angeles Times
December 19, 2004 Sunday
Home Edition
BOOK REVIEW; Features Desk; Part R; Pg. 10
First Fiction
by Mark Rozzo
The Sucker’s Kiss
Alan Parker
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s: 352 pp., $23.95
The British film director Alan Parker (“The Commitments,”
“Mississippi Burning”) tries his hand at fiction in this rollicking
tale of a San Francisco pickpocket and his picaresque journey through
early 20th century America. The cutpurse in question is Tommy Moran,
an Irish kid with a droopy left eye and magic hands able to probe
strangers’ pockets without detection. As Tommy describes his talent,
“I could slide in and out of a sucker’s purse like melted butter.”
Left a virtual orphan after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he
zigzags back and forth across the country, landing in such archetypal
settings as Rudolph Valentino’s wake, the Kentucky Derby, a Jack
Dempsey fight, Niagara Falls and Coney Island. But much of “The
Sucker’s Kiss” (the title alludes to an especially challenging
face-to-face pickpocket maneuver) reads like a mash note to San
Francisco. Parker re-creates the 1906 quake with the imagination of a
brainy school kid fascinated by the rush of history.
In subsequent years (the novel takes us up to the Depression), we
discover the city’s ethnic nooks and crannies: Tommy’s best friend is
Sammy Liu, who works in one of his uncle’s hoodoo joints in Mah Fong
Alley and grows up to be an accomplished gangster. There are the
Italian households and groceries of North Beach, teeming with
laughter, kids and fagioli beans. And then there’s Napa, where Tommy
falls for an Italian-Armenian beauty named Effie and tries to lead a
straight life amid dappled hillsides and a faltering Prohibition-era
wine industry. Can he do an honest day’s work? Is there any point,
when Wall Street fat cats are thieves too?
This is an entertaining, if overheated, allegory of American avarice.
Capitalism is pickpocketry, sleight of hand, a ripping yarn. True to
his cinematic roots, Parker juices up the message with murders, mob
activity, bootlegging, crooked priests, pornography, infidelity and
the like to make clear, as Tommy puts it, “what a screwed-up place
America had become since Prohibition.” Parker might lack his hero’s
buttery touch, but, like Tommy, he has a remarkable flair for getting
away with stuff.