A Better Goodbye by John Schulian

A Better Goodbye Reviews

• 
  James Thane

  This is a dark, gritty novel set in contemporary Los Angeles and featuring two principal characters, Nick Pafko and Jenny Yee. Nick is a former boxer who had a promising career until he accidentally killed an opponent in the ring. After that he was never able to deliver another punishing blow and his career rapidly went south. Now he cobbles together a living, taking whatever menial jobs he can find and living on the margins of society.
  
  Jenny is a young "massage" therapist who gives hand jobs to the clients who patronize the apartments where she and a number of other young women work for an actor who's fallen on hard times named Scott Crandall. Crandall was never very good as an actor and now, well past his sell-by date, he can't even land a part in a crappy cable TV series. While he's trying to recover his glory days, Crandall is surviving by renting several apartments and living off the profits of the women he puts to work there.
  
  Jenny is smart and ambitious; she's going to school and assumes that her job as a "masseuse" is simply a stepping stone that enables her to make a lot of money to give herself a good start in life. Then one day she reports to work to discover that a couple of thugs have raped, beaten and robbed two of the other women working in the apartment. She flees the apartment and gives up the job. Later, though, needing money, she returns to work but only upon the condition that Crandall hire someone to provide security at the apartment where she works.
  
  Crandall hires Nick to provide the security and so Nick's life now intersects with Jenny's. The rest of the story unfolds as dark forces threaten both of them. Nick, Jenny and Scott are well-drawn characters and so are the minor members of the cast. Schulian, who is a sportswriter by trade, provides an especially interesting look into the mind of Nick Pafclo and portrays the seamy side of the massage business and a fairly unflattering portrait of the women who work in it, Jenny excepted. But the story moves very slowly and doesn't contain as much tension as one would normally expect from a book like this. A good read, but not a great one.
• 
  Jim Thomsen

  A BETTER GOODBYE is an uneven but never uninteresting debut crime novel.
  
  Jenny is a little too smart and decent for the cynical, manipulative world of shady massage operations in which she makes her halfway way through life. Nick is a washed-up boxer who needs work — and beyond that, needs purpose. Onus DuPree is a stone thug looking for the next big score, and Scott Crandall is a fading pretty boy who no longer has Hollywood to fall back on. The four are on a collision course, and all trajectories lead to a high-rise "jack shack" in Los Angeles.
  
  There's a "but" for every bit of praise or criticism I could offer for A BETTER GOODBYE. The prose is electric and kinetic, but occasionally sounds like a parody of Raymond Chandler. For every great line like "Dupree had ... elevator-shaft eyes that went all the way to the basement" there's a cringe-inducing sentence like "She came a heartbeat later, and then he did too, with cries that had their origins in primordial ooze."
  
  The characters are all interesting, particularly Scott as the actor who doesn't know how to do anything but act and can't even act all that well. But it's hard to forget that for the most part, they're types rather than people — Nick as the down-and-almost-out boxer is every alienated-man redemption trope ever written; Jenny is every hooker with a heart of gold, or at least gold plating; and DuPree doesn't have much for the reader to connect to beyond a screenwriter-fantasy snarl.
  
  What ultimately makes A BETTER GOODBYE worth reading is its insight — into the pathos of the fallen athlete, and especially into the shadowy world of massage that operates beyond the law. The types of men who patronize such places, the way they relate to the women, the way the women have seen it all and done it all and still make the stupidest possible choices about who to see outside of work.
  
  Author John Schulian is a career journalist of high renown, and his cultural anthropology reflects a deep and careful and unsentimental study of worlds you and I will rarely if ever see. That, and the occasional bit of singing prose — "It was a cold piece of blue steel with a snub nose and no serial number, and it made him forget about McQueen and feel more like Robert Mitchum or Lee Marvin back when film noir has hair on its a--"—make this noir-baked novel a cut above more wholly derivative fare.
  
• 
  Victoria

  If you’ve wondered what goes on in those sketchy “massage” parlors, this expertly written and well paced debut thriller is your chance to find out. Set in Los Angeles on the bitter fringes of the entertainment industry and reeking of fake glamour, the story pulls you into its world from the opening chapter. It’s classic noir, dealing with people who don’t have much going for them who will probably never go far. Schulian has done a remarkable job recreating their lonely world.
  A multiple point-of-view story, the principal characters are Jenny Yee, a Korean college student earning tuition money in the massage business, Scott Crandall, a washed-up out-of-shape television actor whose main source of income is the massage business he owns, his would-be friend Onus DuPree, and Nick Pafko, a former boxer still haunted by the freak accident that killed an opponent when the poor sap hit the ropes exactly wrong.
  Scott was glad to hire Jenny, as his last Asian girl was leaving, and in their business he needed someone to please the “rice chasers.” Meanwhile, her priority is a new job where there is someone to provide security. A string of vicious massage parlor robberies has made the women nervous. An out-of-work ex-boxer who will also keep the books sounds like just what Scott needs. Nick can’t quite get over being offended to be working in a jack shack, but it soon becomes obvious the girls need him.
  Always playing the angles, Scott has no respect for the girls, for Nick, or, for that matter himself. “What a f--- town. Shake a tree and whores fell out of it. Whores and actors, like there was any difference between the two.” Scott is drifting into a closer orbit with his scary friend DuPree, putting everyone at increased risk—not from the cops or any of the other forces of order, but from the climate of violence DuPree creates, like a mountain making its own weather.
  One thing about this book is you learn a whole new vocabulary [!] and a lot about a subculture of desperate young women. IRL erotic massage is estimated to be a $1 billion a year business in the United States, often involving immigrant women with few choices. The exploitation isn’t a surprise, nor is the potential for violence, but Schulian’s uncanny ability to get into the minds of these quite different individuals makes for a compelling read.
  He comes by his skills honestly, with respect to character development and a driving storyline. Although this is his first novel, he has published short stories, and his main career has been as a Hollywood scriptwriter, working for television programs such as L.A. Law, Miami Vice, and JAGS. He co-created Xena: Warrior Princess—for a while the world’s foremost syndicated TV series. He has been a sports and magazine writer and has edited two anthologies of writing about boxing, which no doubt contributed to the authenticity of his character Nick’s voice.
  The book title comes from a Patty Griffin song, “And I wonder where you are, And if the pain ends when you die, And I wonder if there was some better way to say goodbye.” A knockout.
  
• 
  Michael Ferraro

  What if Rocky Balboa lived in Los Angeles, and Apollo Creed never came calling? Master craftsman Schulian, a legendary sportswriter who always found his best fodder in the underdogs and the fringe players, plums that unexamined territory noir-beautifully here with the big-hearted misadventures of Nick Pafko (the name itself a sly nod to being a "Bum", like the Brooklyn outfielder Andy). Nick is a palooka haunted by his past and seeking something not too far from redemption.
  
  He winds up working security in the seedy underbelly of unlicensed massage parlors (or "jack shacks"), and gets sucked into treachery every bit as nasty as the fight game he left behind. Less twists and turns in the third act than an Elmore Leonard fan would hope for, but by this time we've already marked our scorecards for the good guy.
• 
  Andrew

  Good
  
  The author, who is a great sportswriter, knows the milieu of down and out Hollywood and its intersection with the seedier aspects of boxing but the book, which had some good set pieces , never seemed to take off.
• 
  Aleena Dehaas

  Really couldn't get into the book. It has a cool plot and seemed to be interesting. However I found it was a little all over the place and pretty dry.
• 
  Jack Goodstein

  Well done thriller about the seamy side of life in LA--has-been actors, massage parlors, dog fighting, criminals and drugs.