Book Description Review “Elegant.” (New York Times Book Review)“Entrancing…. Patricia Highsmith by way of Alan Hollinghurst: morally gray, utterly mesmerizing, and intensely erotic. Beginning with his 2011 debut, Lightning People, Bollen has displayed a fascination with how power works in America; his newest is an astute meditation on the ways financial inequality and racism affect one’s sense of identity and interactions with others—including romantic partners.” (Alexander Chee, O: The Oprah Magazine)“Deliciously diabolical…What makes the crime in Bollen’s stylish new novel so beautiful is that the perps’ plan works out even better than they’d hoped—at least for a while…A skilled purveyor of suspense…Bollen’s wit sparkles on almost every page.” (Washington Post)“Intricately plotted and elegantly structured…. Bollen captures Venice in all its decadence, art-rich history and ineluctable decay…. His language is simultaneously inviting and forbidding — accessible, playful, and then suddenly, shockingly brilliant.… What makes A Beautiful Crime work so well is how much empathy Bollen affords his characters.” (Newsday)“Fans of Patricia Highsmith’s subtly insidious mysteries will find dark delight in this caper by the talented Mr. Bollen.” (Oprah.com)“A brilliantly conceived international crime story with two complex, queer characters at its center. If you never thought the world of counterfeit antiques could keep you on the edge of your seat, think again. It’s as complex and engrossing as ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ but don’t be surprised when in the midst of the intrigue, the story breaks your heart. We wanted to follow these characters over and around the canals of Venice to see where they’d end up next.” (Good Morning America)“A smart, fast-paced, Highsmith-y novel full of con men, crumbling palazzos, and sentences so sharp they’ll cut you. It made me want to pack a bag and flee to Venice, while looking over my shoulder the whole way.” (David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl)“Like Venice itself, A Beautiful Crime is full of twists and shadows and intrigue – an irresistible and stylish novel in which I found myself thrillingly lost. A master of suspense, Bollen seduces the reader not with tricks, but with beguiling, multi-layered main characters whose flaws are as compelling and relatable as their virtues. I loved every moment in their company.” (Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men)“Extraordinary. A razor wrapped in silk, a cocktail spiked with poison — a novel both sophisticated and savage, inviting and dangerous. Death in Venice? You have no idea.” (A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window)”André Aciman meets Patricia Highsmith in this satisfying exercise in literary crime… Fans of crime fiction will delight in this marriage of knowing aestheticism and old-fashioned mayhem.” (Kirkus, starred review) Read more About the Author Christopher Bollen is the author of Orient, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year, and the critically acclaimed Lightning People. He is the editor at large of Interview magazine. His work has appeared in GQ, the New York Times, New York magazine, and Artforum, among other publications. He lives in New York City. Read more Customers Review: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel. I always wanted to read “just one more chapter,” which is a sign of great read to me! I agree with those who compare the story and characters to Patricia Highsmith AND with those who remark upon the vivid world-building in Venice. It also has a whiff of Goldfinch about it (maybe it’s the antique store aspect or the hint of old New York or the heist travel to Europe), but somehow I found myself absorbing and re-reading passages in a way that reminded me of my first time through the Goldfinch (which is one of my all-time favs). If you’re looking for beautifully written prose with a tension-filled plot set in steamy Venice, this one is for you!
I think this is his best book. His talent for painting his leading characters in many dimensions makes him one of my favorite writers. Much of current writing today is so very shallow. Perhaps the graphic depictions of the sexual scenes will be found difficult for some. For me, a most splendid read. I truly hated it to end!
Superb. Loved all his books but this is my favorite. Such richly drawn characters, fabulous location, elegantly executed plot.
What attracts me to Christopher Bollen is his tensile literary thrillers. THE DESTROYERS and LIGHTNING PEOPLE were standouts of dramatic and suspenseful plots with prose to match them, and kept me fascinated until the exciting finales. Like DESTROYERS, Bollen selected an exotic backdrop; not Greece this time, but Venice, Italy, for his story of intrigue and grift in his latest boiler, A BEAUTIFUL CRIME. Venice, to me, was like a character in the book—the unique pedestrian city of canals and confinement that, at times, expanded its claustrophobic setting, especially if you’re trying to get away with a “beautiful crime.” It brought me right back to Venice—-the author animated it for me once more.Two fairly new lovers, Nick and Clay, come to Venice from NYC with an agenda to rip off a wealthy American, Richard West, who lives in a historic palazzo, a walled half once shared with a former Dutch scion of NYC, Freddy Van der Haar, who lost his wealth to his flamboyant lifestyle and drugs, and recently died of AIDS. He left it to Clay, a true platonic friend. West lives in the other half of the house.West was an enemy to Freddy, and Clay has his reasons, also. The plan is to sell to West Freddy’s ancestral family’s (now) counterfeit silver, enough to pay off debts and start a new life together, away from their sorrows in NYC. It’s an elaborate but simple plan, but develops into even more entangled grift as their rip-off scheme becomes less risk averse and more perilous. I’ll leave it to the reader to watch the plot amplify.Bollen did an adept job of bringing Clay and Nick to life—less so on some of the secondary characters. Although the brutal plot was believable, and I felt each footfall along the Venetian Lagoon, the middle section of the story lost some tempo, as it lulled me with a stretched out narrative—until a knotty jam shook Nick to the core. It added another layer of suspense, but all this treachery had less effect on Clay and Nick’s relationship than I would have imagined. For me, it wasn’t Bollen’s best, but it possessed an acrid charm. 3.5 rounded upThank you to Harper for sending me an ARC for review
It’s risky to write a novel set in Venice. Eminent literary shades — Thomas Mann, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith — inevitably gather, setting up echoes and comparisons: DEATH IN VENICE meets THE WINGS OF THE DOVE meets DON’T LOOK NOW meets THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. On the other hand, La Serenissima, with its ravishing water and light, its mazelike streets, never fails to dazzle and enchant. (I’m lucky enough to have just been there, which made reading this book all the more fun.)A BEAUTIFUL CRIME, Christopher Bollen’s fourth novel, has some of the same themes as that roll call of Venice-inspired books: schemes to swindle the wealthy, same-sex love, getting away with murder. Former editor-in-chief of Interview, the author no doubt has intimate knowledge of the rich, arty and offbeat — and he’s adept at imagining the tangled psyches of those who plot to rip them off.Getting the reader to root for a charming con man/killer — in this case, two of them — is a classic fictional strategy, from Ripley to (more recently) ethical serial killer Dexter and Joe, the stalker/murderer guy in YOU. Bollen pulls it off. And by making Nick Brink and Clay Guillory not only co-conspirators but lovers, he appeals to the romantic in all of us. We don’t want them to be caught; we want them to get their happily-ever-after.The story is told alternately from the two men’s points of view. Nick, a newcomer to Venice, is a devastatingly handsome, compulsively flirtatious guy from Dayton, Ohio: bullied as a kid, still closeted to his family (“For him, walking around as a gay man in his hometown was tantamount to being out on bail: he was free to go about his business, but everyone treated him with a heightened suspicion, as if unsure whether he had committed a crime”), and chafing at the role (“the eternal apprentice”) laid out for him by Ari, his older, highly cultured, marriage-minded boyfriend in New York.Clay’s first contact with Venice, like Bollen’s, was as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the city’s premier modern-art museum; he describes himself as “a middle-class black kid from the Bronx suddenly crowned a prince of Italy.” Still reeling from the premature death of his mother (who “smothered him with love and acceptance” when he came out) and the remoteness of his grieving father, Clay was at a vulnerable point when he became the part-time assistant of an affluent American expatriate, Richard Forsyth West. Later, he found out that his employer had spread false rumors about him, sabotaging his chances for a permanent job at the museum.It was then that Clay became the soulmate of one Freddy van der Haar, scion of an illustrious Dutch-American family that had fallen on hard times and a legendary, flamboyant figure in New York’s gay subculture. For four years Clay lived with Freddy in Venice, Paris and Brooklyn; cared for him during his final illness; and, when he died, inherited some “antique” silver of dubious authenticity; part of a Venetian palazzo; and a humongous pile of debts. Now he needs money, and he wants revenge on West.The route to both is to get West to pay hundreds of thousands for the phony heirlooms. Nick’s role is to authenticate them (Ari, an expert on silver, taught him enough to pose as a professional). So far, so good. Until, well… A BEAUTIFUL CRIME is the kind of novel where you just know something is going to go wrong with the scam sooner or later, leading one or both of the guys to commit acts they’d never imagined themselves capable of. But you don’t know when, or how, and Bollen is adept at keeping the suspense nicely taut.He also excels at evoking Venice itself. His fascination with the watery city is clear, his descriptions both accurate and eloquent. Clay “loved getting lost. It seemed like the whole point of Venice, built to trick and confuse. Taking a wrong turn and nearly plunging into a canal or skipping over a bridge that dead-ended in a brick wall was part of the town’s fugitive magic.” Bollen underlines the tension between those who want to save Venice, preserving its ancient glories, and those who replace palazzi with cheap tourist housing and run roughshod over the diminishing number of people, only 53,000, who actually live there. “I’m afraid the tourists are finally winning,” Daniela, a friend of Clay’s, tells Nick. “We’ve been conquered by a well-organized army of occupiers who have no interest in staying more than three nights.” Or, to put it another way, “Venice has been visited to death.”While Bollen’s characterizations of Venice really sing (“a symphony playing inside a shipwreck”), his people aren’t always as vivid. Supporting players like Ari, Freddy and West’s current assistant, Battista — even the villainous silver expert Dulles Hawkes — seem to me more colorful than Nick and Clay, who need to be presented attractively and somewhat blandly in order to sustain the reader’s sympathy.Nick especially is a bit of a cipher, cute and initially rather passive. He hasn’t yet found his life’s passion; meanwhile, “he has Clay.” Clay is tougher; he grew up “expecting every door to be nailed shut before he even reached to open it.” Yet he, too, is sweet and decent, hardly a hustler or gold digger, though Freddy’s old friends label him as just that.Some critics have compared Bollen to Patricia Highsmith; however, I think he’s gentler than she is. Unlike her antihero, the amoral Ripley, Nick and Clay struggle with conscience; there is nothing offhand about their crimes and misdemeanors. “I’m a really bad crook,” Nick tells Clay. His response: “A bad crook is the best kind.” A BEAUTIFUL CRIME has a lot more heart than Highsmith’s dark thrillers, but the plotting is less skillful, lacking the surprise twists I expected.If the structure is imperfect, the setting is marvelous. Venice isn’t just a scenic background for the action of A BEAUTIFUL CRIME. Its capricious tides and twisty, deceptive geography seem to mirror the characters’ secrets and intrigues. I rooted for Clay and Nick to get away with their swindle. I also rooted — and still do — for proud, resilient Venice to survive the floods of water and tourists that threaten to drown her.Reviewed by Katherine B. Weissman
I greatly enjoyed the characters, writing and plot but too much Venice. The author, Christopher Bollen, lived in Venice as a young men. For most of the book, his vivid love of Venice is a major plus. But For me, the city eventually (and an ancient building) crowded out the suspense.Even though I have visited Venice and the Lido area, I stopped reading several times to look at maps including the map in the book.Still, I read the book to the last sentence, so that’s why I rated the book four stars. The plot is beyond excellent |
12 reviews