Hard Feelings: A Novel
Penzler Pick,March  2002:Perverse as she was, I thinkPatricia Highsmithwould approve. With  his fourth novel, Jason Starr stakes his claim on the claustrophobic territory  that she carved out so brilliantly for the four decades of her writing career.  And the people at Vintage/Black Lizard, the publishers ofHard Feelingsas their first-ever original paperback--who have a number of Highsmith titles on  their classic-noir list--know it. They are also invoking the name of another  darkly unsettling and equally legendary American writer. The editor-in-chief of  Black Lizard, Edward Kastenmeier, says, "ReadingHard Feelingswas like  the first time I readThe Killer  Inside Meby Jim Thompson: eerie, disturbing and blackly comic."Richie Segal, the increasingly strung-out narrator ofHard Feelings, is a  yuppie New Yorker with a co-op in an East Side high-rise, an executive wife  who's just received a promotion, and credit card bills to the tune of $20,000.  He's failing at his job--selling computer networks to midsized companies--and  has just seen on the street, out of the blue, a man who was his neighbor when  they were teenagers. There's something painful about this fellow, Michael  Rudnick, now a successful lawyer, that Richie has suppressed for more than two  decades. And now that he has begun to remember it, the awful unfairness of their  shared shadow history begins to pervade his life, haunting his waking hours...  and his dreams.Hard Feelingsdoes a nearly faultless job of building tension and  following Richie's descent into a world that resembles the one in which he has  previously lived, in the same way a grimace resembles a grin. Fans of Donald E.  Westlake'sThe Axand  Scott Phillips'sThe Ice  Harvestwill love it. It may also be the first "take-out" noir novel,  since in typical New York fashion, Richie and Paula, his wife, possess a stack  of menus rather than abatterie de cuisine. You can almost taste the  chicken chow fun, the boxed pizza, the sushi-to-go, and other bicycled-over  delicacies.The ending may be a too-convenient cutting away from even the slightest glimpse  of a crucial moment in Richie's final deterioration. Others may disagree. But,  ultimately, this minor lapse doesn't keep it from being a terrific--and  terrifying--book.--Otto Penzler