Joe Hustle by Richard Lange - A Book Review
Written by Hally Winters
On a cool summer evening at Stories Books & Cafe on Sunset Boulevard, not five minutes from his home, Richard Lange discussed his novel, Joe Hustle in conversation with Ivy Pochoda. They talked about the changing tide of Los Angeles culture, the disappearance of dive bars, and the gentrification of neighborhoods he spent his college years perusing. He said for this novel, Joe Hustle he wrote a tight narrative. Lange is a seasoned writer who spent his early adulthood in South LA while he attended USC. Not only is the narrative quick and invigorating but the sentence work is clean as bone. He masterfully weaves Joe’s POV into the 3rd person narration while encountering a slew of characters it feels like I’ve met before or know deeply in LA. Everyone seems familiar yet unique to the Joe’s life which perfectly captures the experience of interacting with the range of people found in LA. In his penned epigraph he wrote, “Hope you enjoy this walk on the wild side.”
From early on, there’s this idea of a light within a person, that which keeps someone going and from death incarnate. We see this light pop up and dance inside of Joe Hustle which keeps a reader glued to the page. Although this light within is mentioned within the ambiguity between an unknown interviewer and interviewee, this idea carries on throughout the narrative: a small fire can keep a man safe from death. Joe Hustle is a cowboy of sorts, unafraid of a hard day’s work, but also adheres to his own moral path. In this way, the narrative encompasses the true American Novel, but also brings it full circle with the culmination of the open road plot line. After Keith, an old friend who sometimes gives him work, basically stiffs him of said promised work he calls Joe Hustle from the hospital after ODing to ask Joe to pick up his truck for him. Keith is about to go to jail and can’t ask his wife or she’ll leave him. He offers Joe a thousand bucks to do it. Instead of getting on his high horse for stiffing him of work earlier or saying no to a potential “one-way ticket back to prison”, we get a look into Joe’s head about his reasoning: “The money doesn’t have any bearing on Joe’s decision. Not much, anyway. It’s the principle. It’s against the law, the real law, to kick a man when he’s as down as Keith is now.
‘I got you,’ he says. ‘Everything’s gonna be okay.’” It’s in these moments that we really see the soft underbelly of Joe Hustle. To tell a man who’s hit rock bottom who maybe deserves it, but can’t go to his wife or family for comfort or help, that everything is going to be okay is such a tender moment. As the story goes on, it’s revealed more and more how this act of kindness was very dangerous for Joe. Not only is there “half an ounce of China white” and “a nine millimeter Glock” inside the vehicle but what Joe Hustle spent time in prison for was stealing a car. This momentum is steadily paced as we also learn the woman he’s been getting to know, Emily, has mental and substance abuse issues.
Joe is a character who attracts beautiful things as seen when we first meet Emily and in the same scene a little white butterfly lands on him before he shoos it away because he’s worried “it’ll keel over if it tongues his skin.” Joe and Emily start hanging out and it’s not 100% clear yet that she’s a femme fatale with all the worry Joe Hustle has about himself messing up the relationship. On their first date, she runs out on him after ripping up a strip of photographs they took in one of those retro photo booths. He followed her worried he said something wrong, but really it’s because she misses her daughter whom she lost custody of after a messy divorce. They bond over the difficulties of life and Emily quotes a Philip Larkin poem, “They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” While Joe quotes Robert W. Service, “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, a race that can’t stay still, so they break the hearts of kith and kin, and they roam the world at will.” They learn in this moment to speak the same language but in different verse. It’s deeply intimate. This exchanged verbal intimacy being the exposure of the understanding of one’s own soul, is more important for the relationship to move forward than their first kiss.
The relationship between Emily and Joe feels like a ticking time bomb, but we don’t know who what where or when it will set off. That is until we see Emily taunt Joe on the precipice of the Grand Canyon during their road trip, swinging her arms like she might actually jump off the edge. Until that moment, glimpses of the failure of the relationship, the failure of the journey across the Western half of the US toward Texas, are all apparitions. After Joe lures Emily from the edge, we are left with an image of the deer on the lawn between the canyon: “An open grave beckoning the lonely and the lost,” which he can still feel at his back. He gets the notion they might be “spirits of the canyon’s suicides conjured by Emily reading from her book earlier. Spooked, he stubs out his smoke and creeps past the animals to return to the lodge, not resting easy until he’s in the room with the door locked behind him.” This is also the same scene Emily says she loves him back, but we’re left with a sour taste in our mouths. She says she loves him after taunting him but Joe wonders if she may have actually been thinking about jumping. She declares her love to him in an effort to control the outcome of her own consequences, to maybe quell the anger that Joe has from being put into that position of witness.
Things changed that night. It flips a switch in Emily as they come closer to Austin. They originally took to the road to see Emily’s daughter all the way in Texas, but Emily reveals this to be a hoax. She has no daughter, no husband, no messy divorce. There are moments where the reader wonders what she’s hiding, but when the truth hits, it hits hard, and it doesn’t set anyone free. Instead, it sets her loose and Joe chases her out the door as she reveals this information. So much of this book is about near misses from light which saves a man from death incarnate, to Emily jumping in front of a train and missing it as Joe covers his eyes so as not to see the mess, to the nearly last line being about a car crash that doesn’t kill him. Joe Hustle’s story isn’t just about hustling for jobs, but how life is a hustle. Although this is intuitive from the get-go, the journey Lange takes you on through Hustle’s moments in life is nothing short of a great American novel about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps whatever that may be, and on the way there why not fall in love? Though his love is gone and the scene has gone to black, the memory of it is what keeps him going. The discovery that love and pretty things still exist in this world keeps him going. That light inside him hasn’t gone out.
Joe Hustle: A Novel
Published by Mulholland Books
272pgs
Hardcover: 9780316568470 | June 2024 | $29.00
Hally Winters is a writer from Los Angeles. Hally was awarded the CalArts post-grad fellowship for her class on California Literature as well as a residency with Sundress Publishing. Her work has been shortlisted for Fractured Lit’s “Elsewhere Prize” and her writing can be found at The Los Angeles Review, Laurel Review, drDOCTOR, and more.
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A well-crafted review. Thanks!