Review: Jana

Jana by David Veronese

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Small time hustler meets girl. Small time hustler falls for girl like a ton of bricks. Small time hustler gets pulled in over his head in a world of thugs, rock stars, stolen drugs, and crooked cops. Small time hustler has to pull his ass out of the fire and try to figure out what makes girl tick.

So why, then, is it all so very dull?

In a book full of gun toting criminals chasing the protagonist and double crossing each other and threatening to cut each others' throats, I shouldn't feel like I'm falling asleep every other page.

For all that the basics seem to be in place--unsavory characters, women of questionable virtue, crooked cops, threats of violence, etc--Jana is just so god awfully tedious.

It's not just that there's not a single likable character in the book--Eddie, the protagonist, is a two bit, two dimensional loser who, despite a profound love of classical art (which, frankly, felt like a too-obvious attempt to give a shallow character some much needed depth), still never comes close to being the puckish rogue the book pretends he is; Jana has even less depth, existing entirely to tempt Eddie and spew pseudo-philosophical nonsense at every turn, insult Eddie, and vanish without explanation--it's that none of the characters has any weight at all. They're so completely lacking in history or emotional centers, that when one of them threatens to jump out a window, my first reaction was "would anyone care?" It's a paper doll play full of petty, unpleasant characters; sure, there's lots of motion, but there's no reason to care about any of them or what happens to them.

The closest we get are a few thin references to Eddie's sister, but other than that... nothing. No explanation for why Jana (the character) is so appealing, no explanation for Eddie's laissez faire attitude towards his marriage, etc. And, honestly, lamp shading the inexplicable luck that Eddie has with women does nothing to make it less ridiculous.

Ultimately, this just wasn't my kind of noir.




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