The Ultimate Good Luck

Quinn is a veteran who came back from Vietnam only to drift from job to job, from place to place, the one thing of value picked up on his wanderings being Rae, whom he met randomly at the dog tracks in Kenner, Louisiana. Rae is a redhead stunner, impulsive and idealistic.

And Sonny is Rae's ne'er-do-well brother, locked up on drug smuggling charges in a vast jail outside Oaxaca City. He's said to have stolen from his suppliers too, which is why various folks with sinister names like Deats and Zago are threatening to do him harm, even as he lights up to high heaven in jail. Can Quinn get him out in time? Who will he have to persuade, what palms will he have to grease before the sands run out for Sonny?

The dusty smell of tropical noir is strong here - people have referred to Hemingway and Robert Stone as obvious antecedents - and the gimlet-eyed authorial gaze is at times inseparable from anthropological racism. Ford is very good on the bleached burnt-out atmosphere of Oaxaca, the mood of military menace thick in the air, matched in turn by the bleached burnt-out characters, none more so than ex-military Quinn himself. Quinn believes above all in control, and Rae's love is the very antithesis of control.

Although often lost in the Mexican maze, he is in fact a competent operator and ends up proving his mettle in the violent finale. That finale though is half cliche. Maybe in this story would have worked, maybe back then you could spend a whole page on describing the actual boiling of a frog in a pan to make the most blindingly obvious point, but today not much of this stuff holds up.

It is interesting to see how American literary prose has moved on from that earlier style where you could get away with saying things like - "the shabby, mesmerizing drowse of small chances being taken" and "a pressure seemed released and an inevitability forged, and he thought of the day with longing" and "they all seemed fixed and detached in a pleasing way that made him want to stay in the gallery for a long time" - all of these specimens of laboured overwriting taken from just two pages opened at random.

Too many have criticised the cryptic confusion of this type of prose for it not to be a genuine problem. The vagueness and obfuscation, sometimes verging on parody, are all the more frustrating when one remembers the promise of that superb, action-filled opening chapter. In sum, Good Luck is in many ways a representative work of its time. But it falls some distance short of classic status, so three stars it is. It has been years since I read this book, although at the time I probably would have rated it much higher than I do now.

This because at the time I read it, The Ultimate Good Luck was a favourite among those whose literary taste I admired and, to be honest, copied. Now that I have decades of reading under my belt I feel less dependant on others to form my opinions, and I strongly suspect the book was kind of derivative of the writing of Robert Stone mixed with a strong impulse to bring that manl It has been years since I read this book, although at the time I probably would have rated it much higher than I do now.

Now that I have decades of reading under my belt I feel less dependant on others to form my opinions, and I strongly suspect the book was kind of derivative of the writing of Robert Stone mixed with a strong impulse to bring that manly style of Hemingway's forward a few decades.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, but my point is that I suspect there is more contrived than honest about the book. I'll need to re-read, of course, but I just wanted to drop these thoughts into Goodreads so that when if ever I do re-read I'll be able to remind myself of what I feel today. This book started well enough, but it then began to feel familiar and quickly became annoying. Bernhardt's cryptic conversations with Quinn seemed to have no real purpose and didn't really go anywhere.

Neither Quinn nor Rae seemed to care that much about Sonny, so the whole exercise began to seem pointless. And I didn't really care for either of them that much. None of the character's motivations made any sense. And most of the dialogue was uninspired - people talking at each other, not to Meh. And most of the dialogue was uninspired - people talking at each other, not to each other, people not really saying anything or making cryptic statements.

It was really a go nowhere book. When I break it down like this, I wonder if it wasn't really more of a one star book, but I have read many one star books and I don't feel like this was there. But at only pages, it was a slog.

Reminded me of the film The Counselor. Only Ford's excellent writing style gives this book any real value and even that is butchered by the book's numerous failures. I have read many of Ford's novels. I couldn't really enmesh myself into this one. The characters were nicely drawn and the setting was well felt. The aimlessness of the characters did not draw me in.

About The Ultimate Good Luck

May 11, Khris Sellin rated it it was ok. I loved his Frank Bascombe series and decided to go back to his earlier work. Shades of misogynistic and rambling Hemingway and Kerouac.

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Just depressing and dark and soulless. Mar 17, Shawn Conner rated it it was ok. Wanted to like this more than I did. But I found myself lost in too many grimly abstract sentences, and confused when something was actually happening. Seems more like a stylistic exercise the author couldn't fully commit to than a successful noir, and ultimately unsatisfying because of that. Quinn must navigate the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico and deal with all manner of shady people in his efforts to get Sonny released.

KIRKUS REVIEW

Sonny, who had been caught running drugs, needs to get out of jail in order to escape the men who think he skimmed money from the drug deal gone bad. His time is limited, and this adds a certain suspense that carries the action of the novel. The Ultimate Good Luck is a very existential novel, and while that's not a bad thing, there are numerous vague passages.

For example picked at random: Quinn felt something changing imperceptibly, something that didn't make any difference. It was simply the less important thing you gave up, the slightest measure of control, he knew, that meant you wanted something very bad" 63 ; or "he thought he looked good enough and up to things, even though he felt just at that precise moment like a man falling, all out of attitude and disposition, from somewhere he didn't remember toward someplace he couldn't see" The novel is full of this kind of writing. It demands to be read slowly and carefully, yet I'm still not sure what to make of much of it.

The dialog between the characters carries with it the same vague, disconnected quality. Finally, I was never quite sure what to make of the relationship between Quinn and his wife, Rae. It is obvious that Quinn is damaged from the war, and Rae's nearly constant drug use doesn't help, but I could never pin down why Quinn would go to the lengths he does to get Sonny out of jail, except that ultimately I suppose we are to gather that he needed the adventure and the risk to survive.

If you haven't read Ford before, I wouldn't start here. I don't think it is representative of his work as a whole. Start with Rock Springs his excellent first collection of short stories , Wildlife, or the Bascomb trilogy. For more, see my blog: Jun 25, Tom Kern rated it it was ok. The Hemingway comparisons abound almost everywhere. However you can't deny the brilliance of the writing which in places truly is like a red hot crystal rock perfectly symmetrical and radiating a searing white light. The opening chapter is such an example. Still it seems Ford has a hard time sustaining that kind of energy and existential angst for pages.

At times the hard boiled existentialism cloaked you can tell this is an early novel as it wears it's influences on its sleeve a bit too much. At times the hard boiled existentialism cloaked in Hemingway-like telegraphed language has a dark and honest truth to it while at other times it almost seems a parody of a pulpy detective novel or over the top film noir. Finally the characters themselves are never fully fleshed out which may be the point if Ford could maintain the sense of futility and dread throughout.

You never really know why Rae stays with Quinn or even her feelings for her brother Sonny which seem to never be developed which make you wonder why she would risk so much to get him out of prison to begin with. Babb, at the time chairman of the English department. He'd send them out to small magazines and they'd come back in the mail with "puzzling, infuriating" letters of rejection.

He began to wonder if he wasn't wasting his time. During the interview process, the fellowship committee asked Ford if he was working on a novel.

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I knew I'd go on to novels anyway because I was so sick of getting my stories back in the mail. If I wrote a book, I could have an uninterrupted period with no one rejecting me.

The Ultimate Good Luck

When his stipend at Ann Arbor ceased, Ford spent several months back at Irvine, teaching writing and fine-tuning his novel. The Mayor of Casterbridge. The April 3rd Incident. A Ladder to the Sky. The World According to Garp. The Splendor Before the Dark.

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