Cold Cuts

On Donald E. Westlake's The Ax

This piece originally appeared in The Nation in 2009, less than a year into Obama’s first term, when it appeared America was on the verge of putting a halt to the radical right takeover of the Republic. What I think of reading this now isn’t just how Reagan and Bush Jr. and Sr. laid the groundwork for the aspirational fascism of current America, but how some of the smartest classically liberal voices, men like Mario Vargas Llosa and Jean-François Revel, writers who understood the hypocrisy that underlay too much left thought, couldn’t keep themselves from pimping for unfettered free-market economics. They deserve to be judged for this idiocy as much as for their brilliance. It has been announced that The Ax is the basis for Park Chan-wook’s upcoming film No Other Choice.

The men who killed themselves in shame during the Great Depression because they couldn’t provide for their families didn’t feel any less responsible because of the social and economic forces arrayed against them. And it appears, in the horror stories that have been in the news since last fall, neither did the men who have killed their families as well as themselves during our Great Recession.

Burke Devore, the out-of-work protagonist of Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, fully understands what he’s up against. “The layoffs are too extensive,” he says, “and are in every industry across the board, and the number of companies firing is much larger than the number of companies hiring. More and more of us are out here now, another thousand or so every day, and we’re chasing fewer and fewer jobs.” In Burke’s hands, knowledge becomes power.

The downsizing of the late ’90s seems far less desperate than our present straits. Now, twelve years after The Ax initially appeared, we can see that time as a midpoint between the economic Darwinism unleashed by Ronald Reagan–“This world we live in began fifteen years ago, when the air traffic controllers were all given the chop, and suicide ran briskly through that group, probably because they felt more alone than we do now”–and the catastrophic endpoint those policies reached under George W. Bush.