Stellar review of BRUTES at Turn and Work

 

 (I couldn't ask for a more thoughtful read of my book)

Read it at TURN&WORK HERE 

Rock musician Bill Whitten’s short story collection Brutes is sharp, spare, and darkly magnetic. Morally grey stories about marginal figures in hard times.

This book found me in the most interesting way. I heard William Carlos (aka Bill) Whitten‘s latest album Telepaths back in April and was absolutely captivated by it. When doing the research for that post, I learned that aside from his history as an acclaimed musician and songwriter, Bill Whitten is also a published short story author. Sounds like a perfect fit for Turn & Work, right? Buddy, you don’t know the half of it.

If William Gibson or Elmore Leonard wrote contemporary short stories about fading ’00s era rockers, it might look something like Brutes. Morally ambiguous stories told with direct language and no superfluous detail. Every word carefully chosen for maximum impact and efficiency. This book reads like one of the forgotten classics published by NYRB.

Whitten has a knack for joining a scene in progress, establishing the stakes on the fly. It kept me on edge as a reader, like a single moment of flagging attention would mean missing a critical detail. Dialogue propels the narrative but doesn’t pander. Whitten writes like a guy with somewhere to be. Here’s how the narrator’s girlfriend is introduced in “On the Beach”, the second story in the collection (read it here):

She had a trust fund, a brimming bank account but I was paying for everything. And despite that, I was incidental to her fate, her destiny.

I’d met her in London just as the tour ended, as the drugs were wearing off, as the threat of violence increased with each passing moment.

In “Burn the World”, a cop is convinced that a kid sabotaged his landlord’s car, and his obsessive, threatening temperament and slightly unhinged pursuit of justice clouds his judgement. “The Chauffeur” revolves around a driver who moonlights as a drug dealer, whose worlds collide in unexpected ways. In “Time and Its Shadow”, a man wakes up in permanently disfigured after nearly being killed by a driver, whose enormous wealth changes the injured man forever.

These characters are all Brutes, though of different measure: there’s no moral to these stories, no judgement of their actions. They’re marginal people in desperate situations, taking what seems like necessary action, even if it’s shockingly destructive.

Whitten’s stories seem unrooted in time – published in 2021, these could take place anytime between the 1970s and the late 90s, between The French Connection and Pulp Fiction, before cellphones became ubiquitous. Much of the tension is built by missed connections or misunderstandings that couldn’t happen in the age of the smartphone.

Like so many renowned short story writers, there’s a cadence and a certain stylistic coherence to Whitten’s work. His worlds are slightly disorienting and off-kilter, which matches the mood and circumstances of the characters. Endings are ambiguous or vague. The stories never feel repetitive or recycled; more like they’re a series of plays staged by the same actors, switching roles with each act.

When I wrote about Telepaths, I praised its literary qualities. Somehow there’s a rock-and-roll energy to Brutes that achieves a similar balance: it’s surprising that the book doesn’t smell like an old leather jacket and cheap whisky.