The Easiest Thing in the World: The Unpublished Fiction of George V. Higgins - Softcover

George V. Higgins was a former Boston district attorney and newspaper columnist. The author of numerous works of crime fiction, including The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Cogan’s Trade, and A City on a Hill, Higgins died in 1999. Matthew J. Bruccoli, the Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, is the editor and author of many biographical and critical works on American writers.

Posthumous collections of previously uncollected fiction tend to please only die-hard fans of the late author. But this one deserves to find more readers. These are melancholy stories about guys of a certain age and with heads full of hard-fought wisdom about women, faith, their families, and work--but mostly about women. They are lapsed churchgoers, many of them, and they sell cars for a living, or write the newspaper stories nobody's talking about, or pull extra highway patrol duty to earn enough cash to improve the ramshackle country house they bought, nearly over their wife's dead body. It's maybe three on a Sunday afternoon and they're sitting two stools down the bar, and after a while they come unhunched from the Tom Collins they've been nursing and remark about the weather in slow preamble to telling you the story of their lives, nodding along sagely to yours. Several of the shambling, rambling monologues presage Mamet--except that Higgins seemed to feel empathy for his sad sacks. Ultimately, these are museum pieces. But people still enjoy museums, don't they? Frank Sennett
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