Counterfeit Whore

All good stories begin with fascinating characters, and this novel is replete with them. We have Gwen, nineteen, five feet two inches, voluptuous and gorgeous. Gwen is a budding journalist who will do anything to get a story and the story she gets leads her far deeper into an awareness of herself and sexual experience than she ever planned to go. We have Dan, big and brawny, a young cop, who discovers in himself a love of Gwen so overpowering that it leads him to heights of heroism and to depths of human understanding. We have the shadowy Mr. Mason, a Las Vegas racketeer, whose shadow grows blacker and more vile with each succeeding revelation of his character. And then we have Cliff, a giant of a man who proves to have a gentle heart; Claudia, a whorehouse madame and a sadistic lesbian; and Bob, Gwen's understanding and intelligent journalistic employer. And the story these characters tell us convinces us of its own incredible truth. That much of the Las Vegas scene is gangster-controlled is an obvious truism. But the extent to which these mobsters control other human beings, in fact are capable of enslaving other human beings, is not so well known. In an atmosphere and an environment of amorality, what does one do for kicks once he controls all the money that he can use? Mason provides us with at least one answer: he wants to control people, body and soul. Mason succeeds in breaking Gwen, in turning her into a sniveling, perverted shell of the once strong, beautiful girl she was, and he does so merely to provide himself with the pleasure that money no longer can buy him. But Mason miscalculates, as do most monsters. He discounts love as a force, as a meaningful human possibility. In a final scene as brutal yet believable as anything in contemporary literature, the ultimate power of love, the ability of two people to believe in each other and to forgive each other for being human, is beautifully conveyed. Love, too, is a four letter word, and, as this novel shows, it is even more powerful than the others.

Dettagli