Ah, the dialogue. It takes up a good eighty percent of the novel, and you
wouldn’t mind if it took up the full hundred. No one, before or since, has
ever written dialogue this scabrous, this hysterically funny, this pungently
authentic—not Elmore Leonard, . . . not Richard Price, not even George
V. Higgins himself [. . .]. Open any page of this book and you will find vast
riches of the spoken word. . . . In most novels, talk is the salt and plot is the
meal. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, talk is the meal. It’s also the plot, the
characters, the action, the whole shebang. (ix–x)I wholeheartedly agree that Higgins’s dialogue deserves plaudits. Indeed,
like Vladimir Nabokov’s style in Lolita, it provides an excellent example of a
well-crafted part of a narrative that offers substantial aesthetic pleasure inde-
pendent of its contributions to the evolving progression. This pleasure arises
from the very display of such colorful speech, from the Bakhtinian hetero-
glossia within and across conversations, and more generally from Higgins’s
performance as the composer of it all, including the “lowbrow arias.” Differ-
ent readers will have their own favorite passages. Here are just a few of mine:
Eddie’s telling the gun dealer Jackie Brown in the very first chapter what it was
like to get his fingers slammed in a drawer, an aria that ends with “Ever hear
bones breaking? Just like a man snapping a shingle. Hurts like a bastard” (5).
Eddie’s metaphor to describe the magazine of a gun: “Got a mouth on her like
the Sumner Tunnel” (21). Jackie Brown’s line, “This life’s hard, but it’s harder
if you’re stupid” (78). And this exchange between Eddie and Dave Foley, an
enforcement agent for the U.S. Treasury: Eddie talks about buying skis to take
on his trip to New Hampshire for his sentencing hearing after his conviction
for transporting stolen whiskey. Eddie: “I figure as long as I got to go up there
I might as well make a weekend out of it, you know? Think we’ll have snow
by then?” Foley: “I think we’re getting some right now” (12). The dialogue is
often so arresting that it is easy to get stuck on the idea of its “authenticity,”
but I shall resist that impulse here as I focus on how Higgins uses it to com-
municate with his audience.
DIALOGUE AND THE DIALOGUE NOVEL; OR
CONVERSATION AS NARRATION
In Living to Tell about It, I argue that character narration is an art of indirec-
tion, one in which an implied author designs a single text to fulfill the different
communicative purposes of at least two tellers (implied author and character
narrator) addressing at least two audiences (narratee and authorial audience).
As I noted in chapter 1, character-character dialogue is an even more complex
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 171