Mule by Tony D'Souza

Published by Mariner Books on September 27, 2011

James Lasseter and his soon-to-be-wife Kate are living the good life in Austin when Kate, newly pregnant, is fired from her job. The economy has gone south and James, a freelance writer, can't get an assignment. James and Kate move to a mountain in Northern California where they can stretch their meager savings while deciding what to do next. As Kate shares a joint with a friend from Austin who raves about its quality, James soon realizes that he can earn serious cash by selling NoCal weed in Austin and elsewhere. Thus begins James' career as a mule: a runner of drugs between California and Florida.

For a bright guy, James does some remarkably stupid things, like continually booking one way flights from Florida to California and renting cars for the return trip. He might as well have stamped DRUG MULE on his forehead. He also does a deal that screams "trouble." I suppose the moral is "Greed will make you do stupid things." True enough, but that tale has been told many times before, often more convincingly than D'Souza tells it here.

Had this been a true story, a memoir of a life of crime, I would probably have found it more interesting. As a work of fiction, it lacks pizzazz. Tony D'Souza's writing style is bland and part one of the story he tells is surprisingly dull. James speaks of feeling both nervous and elated while driving drugs cross-country, but D'Souza failed to make me feel James' emotions (to his credit, that changed in part two). When a fairly predictable moment of drama finally arrives (about midway through the novel, toward the end of part one), the dramatic boost it gives to the story is too little, too late. The dramatic tension is stronger in part two as James' drug business begins to unravel, but never reaches a state I would describe as gripping.

On the other hand, D'Souza does some things well. He writes movingly of the toll an economic downturn takes on the lives of the working poor. He captures the marital conflict that results when one spouse wants the other to be home more but doesn't want to give up the income he's earning -- although that aspect of the novel becomes tedious in its frequent repetition. He persuasively portrays the perniciousness of a moneyed lifestyle: it's easy to say "I'll just do this once or twice," not so easy to give up the benefits of steady cash flow. Of course, all that has been done in other novels, often in more scintillating prose.

Although I liked the ending -- it isn't credible, but it's satisfying -- this is ultimately a novel about whiny characters who make a soap opera of their lives while playing at the game of drug dealing. The serious dealers are caricatures, Hollywood versions of what heavy-handed dealers are supposed to be like. The novel isn't awful by any means, but it rarely rises above ordinary.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS