Novel Is Obvious Product of Littell's Newspaper Years

By: Seth Porges Book Review
Corruption: A Novel of a Boston Newspaper
by Ciaran Ross
Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc., 137 pages

"Bring me a release with some juice in it," a character asks early into Corruption: A Novel of a Boston Newspaper, the first novel in 40 years by journalist Allan Littell, now writing under the name Ciaran Ross. And Littell (as Ross) attempts to do just that.

To be sure, Corruption is more about Boston than about the newspaper industry. The book paints an anachronistic, oddly romantic, picture of the city. This is the Boston of the Kennedys and the Celtics. Of God-fearing Catholics who slur their "R"s when they talk. Littell, a newspaper editor and political writer by trade (at The Boston Traveler, for example), attempts to funnel his own love and knowledge of the profession into his pages.

A tale of machine politics (one character is even named Daley) and the ethical issues of a newspaper and its staff, Corruption rides the narrow fence between cliche and entertainment. Lines like: "Look, nobody said anything about losing. I don't ride a losing horse" sum up the plot and tone of the book, and capture this fragile balance.

But the appeal of Corruption is not its plot. Rather, Corruption looks into a fictional Beantown that lies somewhere between 1923 and 2003. The images that come to mind are a hybrid of a modern cubicle-laden newsroom awash in fluorescent bulbs, and a cramped smoke-filled quarter where cigar-chewing reporters type furiously on a typewriter with one hand, and nurse a bottle with the other. It is a uniquely glamorous image, for sure -- and one that's milked to its limit in Corruption, if not explicitly, then certainty in pathos and implication.

Littell's style is the obvious product of years of newspaper experience. The rapid-fire prose, which sometimes feels like Joe Friday of "Dragnet" speaking at 72 rpm, reads like a newspaper article with its inverted pyramid torn from beneath. Whether this style, and subject matter, can hold the attention of someone who doesn't spend their days at a big-city newsroom is another matter. The plot seems torn out of a mid-century film noir. In fact, the book's title pretty much sums it up. Whether this derivation is an intentional tribute, or pure backwash, is open to debate.

Littell's previous novel was Courage, a "novel of the sea," published in 1962. He is currently a nationally distributed travel journalist.