wanting to know just how much information he has to give Foley in order for
Foley to make the call to New Hampshire. For his part, Foley wants as much
information as possible in exchange for doing as little as possible for Eddie. If
Eddie misses this dimension of the deal, Foley is not going to point that out.
Later, after Eddie does turn in Jackie and the New Hampshire U.S. attorney
tells Foley that’s not good enough to affect the sentencing, Foley reminds the
distraught Eddie that he only promised to make the call and that Eddie ought
to grow up. As Jackie says, “This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid” (78).
Higgins uses these authorial disclosures through the conversations and
the restricted role of the narrator to establish his own—and his audience’s—
affective distance from the characters and the action. Eddie’s plight has the
potential to make him a sympathetic character, but Higgins’s own clear-eyed
portrayal of Eddie’s participation in the ethics of exploitation renders Eddie
unsympathetic. Higgins’s audience does not attach in any powerfully affective
way to any of the characters, even as that audience is drawn in to the com-
plexity of Eddie’s situation and his effort to stay on the tightrope. The implied
Higgins emerges as a dispassionate examiner of Eddie and the world in which
he moves. Higgins projects neither affection nor disdain for his characters but
instead a clear-eyed view of this world’s values—self-interest, money, informa-
tion—and the way they intersect and interfere with each other. The greatest
effect of this clear-eyed view is that it fuels Higgins’s penchant for irony, a
point I’ll return to below.
HIGGINS AND DILLON
Dillon appears as a speaker in chapters 6, 11, 23, 26, 28, and 29, and he appears
as the subject of other people’s conversations in chapters 3, 14, and 24. All
of these conversations are worthy of analysis, but I believe I can capture the
key features of Higgins’s communications by summarizing several and then
looking more closely at a few. In chapters 6, 11, and 23, Higgins shows Dil-
lon speaking with Foley about Eddie. Dillon’s reports of Eddie’s activities in
and around Dillon’s bar further complicate the instabilities associated with
Eddie, since these reports raise Foley’s suspicions about Eddie’s current crimi-
nal activity. In addition, Higgins uses the structural similarity between the
Eddie-Foley conversations (chapters 2, 16, 21, and 25) and the Dillon-Foley
conversations—a member of the mob turns informer—to add an additional
irony to Eddie’s situation: the rat gets ratted on. Thus, part of the authorial
disclosure is that Eddie is as mistaken in trusting Dillon as Jackie is in trusting
Eddie. As for Dillon himself, his conversation in chapter 6 makes him appear
180 • CHAPTER 9