"Waiting to cross Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, I spotted Michael Rudnick, a guy who grew up across the street from me in Brooklyn."
In less than 30 words, author Jason Starr introduces the reader to the main conflict in the world of Richie Segal, a man preoccupied with his job as a salesman in the world of computer software, his wife's success at her job and his tumultuous past. Throughout the novel, Richie rides a roller coaster of stunning successes and abrupt failure.
The novel is a 245-page exploration into the world of noir literature and into Richie's consciousness, an easy book to read but difficult to accept its characters as three-dimensional, fully faceted individuals. Richie, coincidentally, mentions several times that he is a graduate from "SUNY Buffalo" and classifies the Queen City as a "hellhole."
Richie and his wife, Paula, live together in an uneasy marital truce. Their relationship is complex and difficult to fathom; Paula cheated on Richie mere months after they first wed, leading Richie to suspect her every relationship with other men. Perhaps the most telling sign of the inherently unstable condition of their marriage is that it is not until police question Richie as part of an investigation that Paula admits to her husband that she, too, was sexually abused as a child.
The situation degenerates further as Richie begins to remember more and more about his young life, triggered by that first encounter with Michael Rudnick, the bully of his childhood neighborhood. The plot takes a surprising twist when Richie begins to recall that not only did Rudnick taunt him as a child, he also sexually abused a lonely, new-to-the-neighborhood Richie.
The growing consciousness of his past understandably destroys what little concentration and dedication to his job and marriage Richie has left. His past difficulties with alcoholism resurface, his marriage becomes more and more strained, and he loses his office at work - in the world of management, a truly damaging blow to one's workplace reputation.
How does Richie deal with the demons of his past? In addition to turning to the bottle for assurance, he begins to stalk Rudnick. The situation worsens in slow degrees until, at last, the climax comes when Richie stabs his childhood nemesis to death in a parking ramp.
The scene, in a novel published by a company named Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, is not unexpected. Once the attack has passed, Richie recovers himself and heads home to New York, where the novel finishes its business.
Hard Feelings tries to address the issue of abuse and its repercussions on children, but the result is an unsteady portrayal of a man and woman, neither of which is able to get over their experiences. Richie deals with his past by denying the pain, while Paula enters a steady stream of therapy sessions in an attempt to deal with her abuse. Neither of the two, despite protestations of love, accepts the other's solution as valid or really understands the other.
"Well, it's over now for both of us," I said, starting to massage her hand gently. "Now we can get on with our lives."
She jerked her hand away.
"It's not over for me," she said. "Maybe it's over for you, but it'll never be over for me. I don't mean to belittle what happened to you, but do you really have any idea what I went through?"
The relationship that Richie and Paula share is a troubled one; the two go from marital bliss to discordant anger over almost any disagreement. This volatility is, in the end, what leads to Richie's inevitable downfall and the violently destructive ending, striking for both its harsh portrayal of the effects of abuse and alcoholism and for its abrupt ending.
Hard Feelings is an intriguing read for those interested in the human psyche and all its eccentricities and foibles. For a light, frothy read, this is not the ideal book; but to pass the time and for mystery/crime aficionados, Hard Feelings is well worth a glance.
Starr has published three other novels: Cold Caller, Nothing Personal and Fake I.D.
