Pretty Boy

July 14, 2003
Live fast and die young, urges this lurid, punchy, mawkish fictionalization of the life of Pretty Boy Floyd, the most wanted man in Depression-era America. Brooks, author of The Stone Garden: The Epic Life of Billy the Kid, styles Floyd as a romantic outlaw, a dreamer who believes bank robbery is his ticket out of the cotton fields and into the high life of fast cars, flashy clothes and, above all, easy women. Framed in first-person monologues by Floyd and associated family, felons and floozies, the vividly rendered stock characters speak in colorful, antiquated slang ("Jeez Louise... ain't this the greatest!") and hard-boiled truisms ("I'm tired of getting shot. It's something you don't get used to"), while the story unfolds in formulaic gangster-movie scenarios, complete with cinematic shootouts and tawdry speakeasy atmospherics. Brooks handles the pulpy material with wit and vigor, though he endows it with emotional turgidity. The hollowness of bank robbery and floozies drives Pretty Boy back to wife and child, until the tedium of lying low and sleeping with one woman sends him once again into the fast lane. Pretty Boy reveals a melodramatic inner life in sentimental passages, pining for home and hearth, pondering fate ("I am swept along by time and fortune") and spouting bad haiku ("Horses laugh somewhere in the night"). Fortunately, the author usually returns to robberies and brothels quickly enough to keep the bullet-riddled, perfume-scented plot moving briskly. Agent, Carol McCleary.