JOE HUSTLE

An Iraq veteran who served time for grand theft auto finds escape from a life of pickup jobs in Los Angeles with a younger woman with perplexing mood swings.

Joe Hustle, as the heavily tattooed protagonist is nicknamed, has done a pretty fair job of dealing with a wretched upbringing. His father, who fatally shot his own brother while 6-year-old Joe waited in the car, was stabbed to death before his sentencing. And Joe’s mother has never had anything but verbal abuse for him. But at 41, he’s in a rut that no amount of drinking and dope smoking can lift him out of. Along comes Emily, whom he meets while working on her sister’s house. A would-be filmmaker who carts around a copy of Anna Karenina (watch for her own encounter with a train), she shows him the kind of affection he’s never known. But between his anger management problems and her apparent bipolar disorder, their romance keeps hitting the rails during a cross-country drive to Texas through Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon to see her 8-year-old daughter. Where they are headed as a couple is anyone’s guess: “It seems like every time he comes up with a plan to get back on track lately, a bomb goes off.” Lange is best known for cuttingly funny novels about killers, dealers, and con men like This Wicked World (2009). Here, though not without an assortment of bad deaths, he returns to the romantic mode of The Smack (2017), with a beautifully toned-down story about a pair of mismatched characters who win our sympathy not in spite of their doing and saying dumb things, but because they just can’t help it. It’s a real pleasure to read.

The latest novel by a first-rate storyteller refusing to be pigeonholed.