Cheap Ticket to Heaven

Charles Smith has given us a moren day version of Bonnie and Clyde. His often poetic prose tells the story with such clearity and newness it is a hard book to put down. Yet with all the beautiful language the message that out lover-killers are outlaws. Lovers, yes, but also unrepentient mutiple murderes. Smiths story makes for interesting reading. The way he has crafted his words make it a pleasure to reed

Like the neon vacancy signs now glowing in a hundred different small town motels, this novel resonates with its steady, sinful relentlessness. Tracking two criminals married in crime and love, Jack and Clare, the novel offers Jack's introspective last look at his life of sin, one given over to a long line of bank robberies and prison sentences and beatings. Still, Jack spares little in his survey of a life so different it shines and horrifies its owner, even in the telling. Smith skillfully interrupts his story with (italicized) snatches of Jack's interview with a reporter, offering attempted objectivity at a criminal life often justified by pure desire - whether murderous anger or impulsive armed robbery. Like remembered hymns lifted in a childhood sanctuary, this novel resonates with its relentless familiarity. Readers will recognize these odd characters, scarred and scared, whose inexorable descent into violence and death charges the novel not with doom but with an unexpected hope. We witness with something akin to belief as Jack lately realizes (courtesy of an elderly, wasted woman) that heaven can descend for those unable to rise. This novel pierces many old myths even as it distinguishes itself with a voice and theme as familiar as it is unique. What appears effortless in fact is the opposite: a craftsman here toils over each word so that each phrase or line of dialogue seems inevitable. While the obvious comparisons to other Southern authors such as McCarthy or Faulkner will surface as the academic world discovers this novel, as it will, Smith here displays a talent as disarming and unexpected as his first name. No other living American author, not one, offers us a fictional world with such tragic and beautiful sights.