The Comedy Is Finished by Donald E. Westlake

 

This novel is set around the same time-frame as last night's read--sometime in the late 1970s--but it does a much better job capturing the hopelessness and existential hangover lots of people were feeling in the reeking wake of the 1960s; the sense that all the protest and violence had been pointless, that all that was left was damage without chance of rebirth. It's also about a crime, like last night's novel--a kidnapping instead of a murder or three, carried out as part of the last gasp of the putatively revolutionary movements instead of as some culmination of criminality. It's a pretty serious novel--there aren't much in the way of laughs, here, in spite of a literal comedian being one of the main characters, but it manages not to be a slog even though it's not much shorter than last night's novel. Unlike last night's novel, this novel is actually good: Westlake had reasons not to publish it in his lifetime, including possibly forgetting it existed (after not wanting to publish it because it was too much like another famous piece of fiction) but I don't think he needed to be ashamed of it.