I Am Death by Gary Amdahl

These days, if a film or TV show or book has anything to do with the words “mob” or “organized crime,” I’m pretty much guaranteed to respond by saying, “I’ll pass.” I own Goodfellas on DVD and still watch it now and then. I’ve caught the occasional rerun of The Sopranos. And I agree that Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy was a good read.

But people in the media are notorious copycats, and thus there have been far too many mediocre movies, shows and books, while still others, in my opinion, have glorified the mob, violence, “made men” and blah blah blah. So I picked up Gary Amdahl’s I Am Death with extreme trepidation. The first of the two novellas in this fiction collection is called “I Am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster.”

And it’s absolutely brilliant.

That’s the mark of a fine writer, or at least one of the marks — a person with such talent that he or she can transcend subject matter that the reader may find trite or off-putting in some way.

Our “hero” (yeah, right) is Jack, a muckraker. Even by the standards of this rather sleazy corner of journalism, his career these days can’t be called exemplary. Then he meets Frank Fini, a Chicago mobster who wants Jack to ghost his memoir, which Fini has the gall to call “A Boy’s First Book of Mobsters.”

What follows is a tale so compelling that I ate it up in a single sitting, on a night during which I should have been attending to other pressing matters. Those errands had to wait, so skillful was Amdahl’s approach to this yarn.

It certainly doesn’t hurt the author’s cause that the story is funny, but in this case let’s clarify “funny.” It sure ain’t slapstick. It’s the kind of story that has you grinning one moment and plunging you into heartbreak the next.

Amdahl’s first book was a short-story collection called Visigoth. As he did in that debut, in I Am Death, Amdahl focuses much of his energy on the foibles, foolish dreams and somehow lovable illusions of the male of the human species. It’s a tough-but-tender world, in which the most reprehensible of characters yet emerge, many of them, as sympathetic in ways you could not have imagined.

The second of the two novellas here, “Peasants”, concerns not a mobster but a fellow who labors in the publishing industry. I found this the less gripping of the two stories, but seeing as how my nose is abraded daily by this particular grindstone, perhaps it felt just too close to home.

I like Amdahl’s decision to write a book of novellas. As I’ve said before, the novella has become a literary form too rarely attempted these days; it’s good to see someone as talented as Amdahl take an interest.

I Am Death is yet another excellent fiction title from Milkweed Editions, the same independent outfit that published Matthew Eck’s The Farther Shore. Kudos to this press for continuing to take chances on fiction that takes chances.