Cogan’s Trade By George V. Higgins Knopf, 212 pp., $5.95 What happened was Will sent up this book and I knew it, I, it’s a book right off I’m gonna go for but not be sure about even I was enjoying it, you know like copping a feel inna dark, could be your own left arm. Guys like Higgins, Higgins got this authentic thing, a semicolon is middle class, his people they can handle commas, maybe a period now and then but they’re not happy about it. What it is is dialogue, Higgins hangs a left with it, hangs a right and you, it, you don’t want to be faked out of your shoes, you can’t worry a relative clause gonna have no relatives and that pronoun he, she, we, it ain’t on speaking terms with no subject he, she, we in this paragraph but maybe back on the last page someplace. Is what I mean.
That’s not a parody, believe me. George V. Higgins’ hunt and peck syntax has built-in hand gestures. It’s accurate, very complex, yet your eye follows the bouncing ball easily. Cogan’s Trade is 90 per cent dialogue; there can’t be 15 pages of narrative in 200, unless you add up the “he saids.” Higgins, ex-assistant U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, has a prehensile ear; probably in that line of work you get to hear tapes and tapes. It’s authentic yet, excuse me, it’s the same authentic. Some authentics in this world, even hoods, use complete sentences, but you couldn’t tell from Higgins. There are eight or ten characters in Cogan’s Trade and it’s all one guy.
Comments