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Sutton (2012)

by J.R. Moehringer(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1401323146 (ISBN13: 9781401323141)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Hachette Books

review 1: Ah now, dear readers, we have here a case of the unreliable narrator. For those who eschewed getting an English degree for the pedantic option of getting an education in order to afford a car instead of bus pass that means that whoever is telling the story can't be counted on to tell the truth. That is the problem with memoirs that rely on the memories of the subject or even the subject's buddies and family. And so it is with Willie Sutton. He spins a good yarn but it is the last quarter of the novel that his story threads start to unravel. It doesn't matter. This is the story of Willie Sutton, as Willie sees it. Or, as Moehringer would have us see Willie Sutton. And Moehringer had to depend on his own research which was written by others who might or might not have pursue... mored the truth, which may or may not have resulted in its successful capture. It's a set of Willie Sutton dolls, each uncovering another version. The biggest doll is how a legend was created, but within that is a small one about how a lonely man found a little peace. You might open up that one though, and find something else.
review 2: Although I thought Sutton had a number of fairly significant flaws, I couldn't put it down, and I was genuinely moved and surprised at several points without ever having felt manipulated. For that, I think it's worth a good four stars. I give it five because it's about a historical character but doesn't pretend to be historical - you know from the outset that it's a work of fiction, so you can dream along with the author and, for that matter, the characters. And such well-written dreams they are.Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, is now old and dying. He's been released from jail on Christmas Eve and his lawyer has committed him to spend Christmas Day giving an exclusive interview. The old man, the Reporter, and the Photographer set off on a roundabout route that tells the story of Willie's life in chronological order. The three men have vastly different agendas for the trip, though, and they see and hear everything differently - and Willie's story plays mostly in his head and doesn't always match the few things he tells his companions or the bulky files that the Reporter keeps referring to. What really happened? How many narratives of a man's life exist side by side? Who gets to decide which of them are real?One criticism: For most of the book, I wondered why Moehringer bothered with the Reporter and the Photographer - it frequently seemed an awkward framing/plot device and got a bit tedious. It serves a purpose thematically and has its own purpose at the end, although I'm not sure it completely pays its way. Perhaps it's just that Willie is so much more interesting than anyone else in his own stories, and Moehringer seems to feel the same way. less

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