Quick! Where’s a Matchstick? Don’t let this book become a film

If there is anything good about Eric Garcia’s new novel Matchstick Men, it’s that Garcia chose a fitting title for a book that is so weak in plot and so thin in purpose that the only interest it sparks is curious speculation over how bad the movie version starring Nicholas Cage will be this summer. As a hokey rip-off of Nicholas Thornby’s novel-turned-movie About A Boy it succeeds wonderfully, but with characters as flat as nickels and a strange ending a la Marky Mark in Planet of the Apes, it fails in every other category.

But Garcia’s story about two con artists, Roy and Frankie, and their eventual third partner, Roy’s teenage daughter Angela, is a particular kind of awful. Besides being unrealistic and unfunny, it confuses con story with sentimentality and Garcia never seems to get any handle on the supporting characters (Roy’s ex-wife, his psychiatrist). It might be ‘a novel of petty crimes’ as the bookjacket cover suggests, but Garcia never communicates to the reader any sense of drama or suspense about these criminals. Although his prose is easy and straightforward, it could actually use some spicing up to keep the story interesting. Instead, Garcia belabors the reader with inane detail, so that many of the passages drag:

‘As he waits, Roy takes stock of the other people in the park. A few singles, like him, walking along by themselves, jogging, bird-watching. For each one, he constantly eyes up the perfect con. Can’t help himself. The lady over by the duck pond would be an easy touch for the covered message scheme.’

Granted, Garcia does seem to have extensive knowledge of the con game Roy and Frankie’s nefarious exchanges and operations come across as detailed and believable. What is less believable are the relationships these characters have with one another, as Roy and Frankie form the stereotypically strained crime-partner relationship: ‘He’s a good partner, a good partner, a good partner. It used to be that it didn’t bother him at all, these things Frankie did, these little personality quirks. The casual disregard for tidiness…’

In addition, when Frankie re-enters his teenage daughter Angela’s life, instead of her feeling hurt and bitter about his estrangement from her, she accepts him with incredible enthusiasm:

‘Good to meetcha,’ says Angela. Her voice is high. Perky. Roy thought it might be this way. Heather spoke this way.

‘Yeah, yeah, good here, too. You sound – you sound a little like your ma.’

‘Yeah?’ says Angela. ‘Everybody says I sound like Lisa McPherson.”

Even though the novel never expresses any pretensions of becoming a great Elmore Leonard crime novel, or even a Sue Grafton alphabet mystery, it slips into a sappy ‘parent-child’ reunion book as Frankie finds himself getting attached to his daughter Angela, and vice versa. The narrative twist at the end only further muddles the plot of Matchstick Men. As soon as we’re ready to settle, Garcia flicks us aside like a … match.