The Swill is a rare achievement in a novel: it has the pace and suspense of golden age detective fiction, while pushing past convention to examine something deeper and more radical. It is an art heist, a period piece, a walk through the mythic history of the United States, but it is also a meditation on courage and violence, and the very question of what it means to be a hero. And if you think you’ve read that book—trust me, you haven’t. It’s a nailbiter till the very end.
It’s also an absolute pleasure to read. Like Raymond Chandler, Guitierrez has the gift of landing the perfect description in perfect timing. Novelists are often lucky to come across a detail that lights up their world once a chapter. Gutierrez is tossing these gems like mardi gras beads.
“Roaches the size of boxing mitts”
Blondes “on the wrong side of pretty.”
A “sapphire, moonless sky” over “a film of water on the road.”
Oh, and it’s funny: think the banter of the classic movie, or the comeback you’d come up with two years later that really would have put them in their place. For a week, my own jealous speech took on the staccato of a tommy gun.
Add in the living history of the setting, the buildings and the musical chatter of people talking, and the novel breathes like good whiskey, sending up a perfume from the pages of what that life must have actually been like. The city itself is, if not a character to avoid that cliche, then a constant living presence that drives the story: things happen because in Port Kydd, they must. Standing against the tide gets you swept out to sea.
But I’m coming perilously close to giving away the show, and that would be a crime.
In the end, the novel’s greatest feat is taking the hero off of his plinth and taking a good hard look at what he’s been up to, all these years.
“All the real men are dead” a character opines at the bar, and of course, she’s right, by her definition of “real man.” Gone to glory over the top. But Gutierrez doesn’t stop at the false dichotomy of the anti-hero, changing a white hat for black. Instead, this is a book about the living—what it means to feel afraid, and paralyzed by the world around you, and how to make the best hard choice you can. Not as a hero, but a human being.
That’s the gift Gutierrez is giving us: a human book, full of life that doesn’t preach, but instead offers to share a story with you, leaning on a bar, putting color back into a world gone gray.
Get two copies: you’re going to want to give one to a friend.
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