J. Kent Messum's Reviews > Donnybrook

I'd heard quite a lot about Donnybrook over the last several years. It's a short novel that has been recommended by plenty of people and has been a blip on my radar for awhile. I finally got around to reading it recently, and it proved to be both an enjoyable and disagreeable experience. It's tough to review a book like Donnybrook for two main reasons.

1) It's the type of story I like to read.
2) It's not the kind of writing I enjoy reading.

The plot is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Set in the broken backwoods of southern Indiana, Donnybrook focuses on a dozen or so dangerous characters, most of who exist on the fringes of society and fight to stay alive, carving out an existence that amounts to little more than survival one day at a time. Unemployment and drug-addiction run rampant as rural societies hang on by their fingernails. Several desperate/deplorable/vengeful story lines are put in motion, all of them advancing toward the fabled 'Donnybrook', a three-day bare-knuckle fight fest where much money can be won and lives can be lost. It's a great read if you're into stories about the state of man's brutality when guys start scraping the bottom of the barrel. The plot gets a little redundant by falling into a loose pattern where robbery, fights, torture, double-crosses, gun play and getting shot seem to cycle over and over again. But otherwise, you get what you paid for; so much savagery that the whole thing starts to lose its bite after awhile.

When it comes to the writing, however, I'd been led to believe that the prose would be lean, clean, and razor sharp. The truth is the narrative is quite bloated in a lot of places; far too much description going on, an awful lot of similes (a good number of them eye-roll worthy), and a lot of instances where the author's stabs at creativity fall flat or fail to connect. Much more could have been achieved with less, which is surprising since Donnybrook is so short a read. Dialogue is great, but the action scenes are frustratingly repetitive and come off like movie script fight sequences that often drag on too long. For such a hard-hitting sinewy story, the writing doesn't match, which is a goddamn shame.

If you like your books brutal and bloody, this novel is a worthwhile read. But I hunger for the kind of writing that emulates the key fighters in this novel; lean, disciplined, and highly effective. You won't find enough of that in Donnybrook unfortunately.