Word: diggers
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...DIGGER'S GAME by GEORGE V. HIGGINS 214 pages. Knopf...
...best American crime novelist now at work is George V. Higgins, who is also an Assistant U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, a state rich in attorneys and in crime. Higgins' superiority seemed certain enough after The Friends of Eddie Coyle, his first novel, appeared two years ago. The Digger's Game, another wry look at Boston Irish lowlife, is his second try, and it is an even better malefiction than Eddie Coyle. No one else is turning out anything remotely like it in the concrete overshoes line...
...first The Digger's Game seems to follow familiar tracks. It is swift-paced, hard, quickly finished. Yet Higgins' plot exposes character, which deteriorates, producing plot, which further defines character. This describes the intent and achievement, not of a formula thriller, even one that is well written, but of a conventional novel. Of course, one does not want to goad a man who writes well about thugs to write badly about something else. Higgins' most obvious strength, moreover, is a traditional one for crime novelists. His dialogue is brilliant. "All the time, I'm thinking...
...your versatility, Offenbach") and the notorious, in the person of Jetty Treffz (Mary Costa), described by Johann's sister-in-law as "the woman who has been scandalizing Vienna." They marry, and Mother's resistance is quieted when she learns that Jetty is not a common gulden-digger after all. There is some nastiness about Jetty's illegitimate son and Johann's trifling with coarse café singers. All comes right at the end, however, to the strains of The Blue Danube and the assurance of a subtitle that "the house of Strauss lives...
...either through the subtleties of patina or its inherent sense of mass; few bronzes, indeed, recall so insistently their origins as clay. They are cindery lumps of inert matter, pummeled and squashed with what appears at first to be a paroxysm of gratuitous violence. In the largest piece, Clam Digger (1972), De Kooning's love of direct action reaches the outer limits of credibility: this mud-footed golem, clumping along inside his ridged, tormented epidermis, is all gesture, assuming form in a challengingly haphazard way. De Kooning's sculptures admittedly look regressive. They evoke memories of the European...