Citizen Vince
by Jess Walter
Summary
Vince Camden makes donuts in Spokane before dawn, deals a little stolen credit card business on the side, plays cards with the town's small criminal class, and holds, as of this week, the first legitimate document of his adult life: a voter registration card, in a name the federal government invented for him. Vince is in witness protection, formerly Marty Hagen of New York, relocated for testifying in the general direction of the mob, and Walter's premise is the joke with depths: eight days before the 1980 Reagan and Carter election, a career petty criminal discovers civic existence, and cannot decide how to vote.
The plot arrives from the old life: a hitman turns up in Spokane wearing Vince's past, the local card game develops fatal stakes, and Vince flies back to New York to negotiate his own survival with the outer boroughs' rising management, a trip that puts him across the table from the Gotti machine hunting him. But the engine throughout is the citizenship comedy played absolutely straight: Vince reading candidate positions at the donut counter, interrogating a local campaign office, conducting the era's talk radio arguments with fellow crooks, the franchise question, who deserves a say, run through a man the system has both erased and manufactured. Around him Walter builds 1980 Spokane with a native's affection, cops, waitresses and strivers rendered at short story depth.
The election day ending lands the whole design, ballot and bullet in the same twenty four hours.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want crime fiction with a civics engine, funny, humane and secretly about what a vote is worth.
Historical Context & Significance
Citizen Vince won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2006, the genre prize catching Jess Walter mid metamorphosis: a Spokane journalist who had written the Ruby Ridge account Every Knee Shall Bow and produced regional crime novels, he was becoming the literary novelist whose Beautiful Ruins would later reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and this book is the hinge, crime machinery carrying the sentence level ambition out in the open.
The book's afterlife has been political in the small sense its plot intends, recirculated every election season, its 1980 hinge election acquiring period glow.
Walter's subsequent range, the 9/11 satire The Zero a National Book Award finalist, the story collections, Spokane loyalty throughout, made him the model of the genre alumnus who never disowned the training.