Born losers (1)

Don Carpenter (1931-1995) is one of the greatest American novelists of all time, and yet his Wikipedia page takes up twenty times less space than Philip Roth's (I measured them). Ignored for much of his career by serious critics and intelligentsia (what he called East Coast Mafia), the author signed ten great novels, a book of stories and at least one great script (Payday, from 1973, starring Rip Torn).

It didn't stop raining, his debut, is a spectacular prison novel, and that's even though Carpenter only spent "one night in jail" (if anyone was asking for irrefutable proof of the power of imagination, this will do). It was published in 1966, but it's a completely different work. not-of-the-sixties, tough and mature, the opposite of Jack Kerouac's puerile mythomania, so to speak. "An old man in a young man's body," as Jonathan Lethem described him.

After moving to Hollywood, Carpenter wrote three excellent novels about the show business and the Los Angeles film industry. A couple of comedians It's about what the title suggests, the friendship between two entertainers, but it can also be read as a tribute to the profession and to being born with a gift (in this case, being funny).

I don't know which one. westernJohn Wayne said of another gunfighter, "He's so good, he doesn't need to prove it." The same could be said of Don Carpenter. His language is precise, effective, unassuming; the author never boasted, never filigree, but he nailed it, word after word. This is popular literature of the best kind: no clichés or grand theories, but full of truth and compassion.

Carpenter was a born writer, someone for whom narrative prose was the default language, as well as the primary way of understanding the world. "If I could express my views on the universe without using fiction, I would," he said. His fans have included George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and, even more relevantly, myself.

His great friend Richard Brautigan committed suicide in 1984. A traumatic divorce and a tragic chain of illnesses (tuberculosis, diabetes and glaucoma) caused Carpenter to shoot himself in 1995, at the age of 64, in his home in Mill. Two decades later, the manuscript the novelist was working on at the time of his death came to light, Fridays at Enrico's. After a little polishing by Jonathan Lethem, the world was gifted with a new masterpiece from the author, straight from beyond the grave.

Kiko Amat