LIFERS By Jeff Somers.
Creative Arts, paper, $13.95.
idlife crises
arrive early for the three young New Yorkers who aspire to lives of crime
in this engaging, laid-back first novel. Damien, a jaded slacker who writes
excruciatingly bad poetry and works as a video store clerk, is game for
almost anything that gives offense and exhibits his individuality. His
roommate, Dan, is an alcoholic accountant belligerently mourning the loss
of the girlfriend who has dumped him. And Phil, who narrates, intermittently
considers himself the sanest and least dangerous among them. He's an underemployed
''cubicle jockey'' at a Manhattan publishing house, whose office equipment
and furnishings the three plot to hijack, then fence. This casually planned
caper draws in Dan's more criminally accomplished Uncle Tommy and Phil's
streetwise cousin Frankie, a serial carjacker -- both promising comic characters
who aren't given enough to do, by either the fledgling robbers or their
author. The only other character who matters much is a waitress named Chick,
the erotic object of Phil's unrealized dreams. Jeff Somers observes these
amiable sociopaths with a funky wit that revs up nicely whenever the three
friends are companionably abusing one another, but stalls whenever his
novel's undernourished plot threatens to upstage the miscellaneous noodling.
idlife crises
arrive early for the three young New Yorkers who aspire to lives of crime
in this engaging, laid-back first novel. Damien, a jaded slacker who writes
excruciatingly bad poetry and works as a video store clerk, is game for
almost anything that gives offense and exhibits his individuality. His
roommate, Dan, is an alcoholic accountant belligerently mourning the loss
of the girlfriend who has dumped him. And Phil, who narrates, intermittently
considers himself the sanest and least dangerous among them. He's an underemployed
''cubicle jockey'' at a Manhattan publishing house, whose office equipment
and furnishings the three plot to hijack, then fence. This casually planned
caper draws in Dan's more criminally accomplished Uncle Tommy and Phil's
streetwise cousin Frankie, a serial carjacker -- both promising comic characters
who aren't given enough to do, by either the fledgling robbers or their
author. The only other character who matters much is a waitress named Chick,
the erotic object of Phil's unrealized dreams. Jeff Somers observes these
amiable sociopaths with a funky wit that revs up nicely whenever the three
friends are companionably abusing one another, but stalls whenever his
novel's undernourished plot threatens to upstage the miscellaneous noodling.