Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281166 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-16
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Uncut
`Brilliant and terrifying'

Glasgow Herald
`The story twists and turns on itself until its final, startling sentence'

Synopsis
When Richard Bone thinks that conglomerate tycoon J.J. Wolfe is the man he saw dumping a body, he and his friend Cutter, a crippled Vietnam vet, set out to the Wolfe headquarters in the Ozarks, totally unprepared for what awaits them.

Customer Reviews

Cuts To The Bone
This book's one of my all-time favourites. Like James Crumley's 'The Last Good Kiss', this is a dark, profane but huge hurt-hearted trawl through 70s America, with damaged characters making the most of their lots, usually badly. The characterisation is searingly vivid, leading the plot rather than the other way around. What does happen to the characters had me - in several places - almost howling at the book with emotion, shock, sadness, anger, and the ending left me blinking into space for several minutes. I immediately ordered more Thornburg off amazon but'll be happy if it's even half as good as this magnificent, ugly beautiful, powerhouse of a novel.

to the bone
A stunning,visceral trip down the mean streets of the American dream.The nightmare that was Vietnam drips of every page and haunts each character.
The novel's premise is quite simple, a murder and the almost demonic quest on behalf of Cutter and Bone to bring the killer to justice. It is this journey that leads to a quite disturbing conclusion, believe me it will leave you breathless.
A classic

Dead Souls
One of the best depictions of mid-'70s America I've come across, this powerful novel was written when the country was struggling to recover from the Vietnam War and remains as a vivid reminder of that time. Set mostly in Santa Barbara, the story follows two men firmly stuck in cycles of self-destruction. Bone dropped out of the corporate life and left his wife and kids in Minnesota to float around California as a gigolo, while Cutter came back from Vietnam minus an arm and a leg and teeters on the brink of insanity. Both are utterly disillusioned with the world around them and spend a great deal of time drinking and trying to blot out their rapidly suburbanizing, strip-mallifying, consumerist surroundings. The third member of this circle of dead souls is the sarcastic, Quaalude popping Mo, Cutter's live-in girlfriend and mother to his baby.

The whole book reads like one big hangover—the party (late '60s free love, rebellion, Vietnam, etc.) is over, and someone's gotta pay. One evening Bone unknowingly witnesses a murderer disposing of a victim, and what he half saw leads to a half-baked scheme to make some money. In another writer's hands, this could have lead to a comic caper, but Thornburg is intent on showing the county's loss of innocence through the bitter, maimed, and reckless Cutter, and his guilt-ridden and aimless buddy Bone. One problem I had with the story was the friendship between the two men. The book unfolds from Bone's perspective, and it's hard to fathom why he keeps returning to Cutter's side, other than guilt and/or a self-destructive streak.

In any event, the book starts fairly slow and there were a few times I considered ditching it. By the second half though, the lean prose gets more and more compelling, and the dilemmas get a bit more interesting. The final quarter or so takes the two men on a road trip from California to the Ozarks, in possible pursuit of the murderer. The climax is awfully gripping in a "y'all ain't from around here" Deliverance kind of way, and the final sentence packs a huge punch. (Well, at least for a few moments.) Still, book's theme—that the Vietnam war did irreparable damage to the American psyche and values, and led to an America where money and consumption are king and justice is a mirage—emerges in full color, and the book remains an important picture of the empty '70s.

Note: This was made into a great dark film called Cutter's Way.