The Grifters

Another great Jim Thompson book. Enthralling and engaging right from the start. It was so difficult to decide how to think about the main characters. Should I feel sorry for them or not? Were they evil or victims of their circumstances? Beautifully written with some great twists in the latter part of the book. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this novel. It was short, simple, very straightforward but almost too straightforward. I appreciate simple prose but not when it is lazy. There were several lengthy passages that read (I'm paraphrasing here) ‘He sat on the bed. He put on his shoes. He left the hotel. He got in his car. He drove around. He drove some more.' Ugh. He even ends a chapter, one where we find Roy (the main character) entering Moira's (his kind-of girlfriend) room to have sex with her, with “And they had a hell of a time.” Ummm, pretty lame.Then, out of nowhere, Thompson dropped a paragraph dripping in poetic beauty and it startled me, like looking at a pretty face with a black eye. And his characters were three-dimensional; Roy and his mother Lilly's relationship being the most interesting of all character interactions in the novel. Even with some of the lazy narrative prose, the book has a very satisfying ending, one that I didn't see coming from a mile away. I enjoyed the end very much and it gave a sadistic depth to the lows these characters would go to fulfill their needs.I think my reluctance to give this novel a better rating is that I enjoyed “[b:The Killer Inside Me 298663 The Killer Inside Me Jim Thompson http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348084659s/298663.jpg 1724756]” much more, with its first-person, unreliable narrator. I think “The Grifters” would have been MUCH more interesting if it was told from Roy's perspective than the unknown narrator's perspective.