Citizen Vince by Jess Walter

From the Publisher

Darkly hilarious and unexpectedly profound, Citizen Vince is an irresistible tale about the price of freedom and the mystery of salvation, by an emerging writer of boundless talent.

Eight days before the 1980 presidential election, Vince Camden wakes up at 1:59 A.M. in a quiet house in Spokane, Washington. Pocketing his stash of stolen credit cards, he drops by an all-night poker game before heading to his witness-protection job dusting crullers at Donut Make You Hungry. This is the sum of Vince's new life: donuts and forged credit cards—not to mention a neurotic hooker girlfriend.

But when a familiar face shows up in town, Vince realizes that his sordid past is still close behind him. During the next unforgettable week, on the run from Spokane to New York, Vince Camden will negotiate a maze of obsessive cops, eager politicians, and assorted mobsters, only to find that redemption might just exist—of all places—in the voting booth. Sharp and refreshing, Citizen Vince is the story of a charming crook chasing the biggest score of his life: a second chance.

The Washington Post - Maureen Corrigan

Two stream-of-consciousness riffs at the center of the novel even take readers into the minds, respectively tortured and serene, of Carter and Reagan. The excruciatingly breathless climax of this novel pits the claims of civic responsibility against those of self-preservation as Vince insists on exercising his voting rights in the face of almost certain oblivion. In its coarse, violent and very funny way, Citizen Vince is an affecting testament to American faith in the common man as well as to the resilient possibilities of the crime novel.

The New York Times - Janet Malsin

… Mr. Walter's voice is too entertaining to turn flat. For readers who appreciate wry precision and expert timing, it may be enough to know that Citizen Vince arrives with sky-high praise from both Ken Bruen and Richard Russo, with whom Mr. Walters shares these qualities. For others, the book's fusion of humor, crime and politics may be recommendation enough.

Kirkus Reviews

A petty thief bucks one system to join another. Notching his first felony at 15, Marty Hagen, the quintessential New York City street kid, has a rap sheet to be reckoned with by the time he's 36. Not that there's anything really lurid on it-certainly nothing violent-it's just nonstop. And then suddenly, almost by accident, Marty becomes a person of interest to the feds, a circumstance that leads to a new name, a new location, and the makings of a new life. Farewell Marty, hail Vince (Camden), reborn, as it were, courtesy of the Witness Protection Program. Though at first Spokane, Washington, rattles his urban sensibilities ("Everyone drives everywhere, even the ladies"), Vince soon grows fond. He gets to like the quirkiness, discovers that the measured pace suits him after all, allowing time for an interest in things that would once have seemed exotic: presidential politics, for instance. The time is 1980, eight days short of the election between Reagan and Carter, and Vince plans to do what he's never done before: vote. Moreover, there are women in his life, two of them, actually, good women in their differing ways. He even likes the kooky job the feds have found for him, donut maker-manager of the estimable Donut Make you Hungry establishment. Then, after two equable years, enter Ray (Sticks) Scatieri, hit-man extraordinaire, emissary from the mob, with an overdue bill in his bloodied hands. Well, exactly who sent him? Why now? Is there a way Vince can square himself in time to render the contract null and void? The answers are admirably unpredictable. This, in fact, is a story full of wonderful small surprises-among them Vince's way of finally achieving citizenhood. Dispassionate andcompassionate by turns, and always engrossing. Walter's best by far (Land of the Blind, 2003, etc.).

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

About the author

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

One day you know more dead people than live ones.

The thought greets Vince Camden as he sits up in bed, frantic, casting around a dark bedroom for proof of his existence and finding only props: nightstand, dresser, ashtray, clock. Vince breathes heavily. Sweats in the cool air. Rubs his eyes to shake the dust of these musings, not a dream exactly, this late-sleep panic -- fine glass thin as paper, shattered and swirling, cutting as it blows away.

Vince Camden pops his jaw, leans over, and turns off the alarm just as the one, five, and nine begin their fall. Each morning at 1:59 he sits up like this and turns off the clock radio in the split second before two and the shrill blast of alarm. He wonders: How is a thing like that possible? And yet ... if you can manage such a trick -- every morning waking up a few ticks before your alarm goes off -- why couldn't you count all the dead people you know?

Start with Grandparents. Two sets. One grandfather had a second wife. That's five. Vince runs a toothbrush over his molars. Mother and father. Seven. Does a stillborn sister count? No. A person has to have been alive to be dead. By the time he finishes his shower, blow-dries his hair, and gets dressed -- gray slacks, longsleeve black dress shirt, two buttons open -- he's gone through family, neighbors, and former associates: already thirty-four people he knows to be dead. Wonders if that's high, if it's normal to know so many dead people.

Normal. That word tails him from a safe distance most days. He opens a drawer and pulls out a stack of forged credit cards, looks at the names on the cards: Thomas A. Spaulding. Lane Bailey. Margaret Gold. He imagines Margaret Gold's lovely normal life, a crocheted afghan tossed over the back of her sofa. How many dead people could Margaret Gold possibly know?

Vince counts out ten credit cards -- including Margaret Gold's -- and puts these in the pocket of his windbreaker. Fills the other pocket with Ziploc bags of marijuana. It's 2:16 in the morning when Vince slides his watch onto his wrist, careful not to catch the thick hair on his forearm. Oh yeah, Davie Lincoln -- retarded kid used to carry money in his mouth while he ran errands for Coletti in the neighborhood. Choked on a half-dollar. Thirty-five.

Vince stands in the tiny foyer of his tiny house, if you can call a coatrack and a mail slot a foyer. Zips his windbreaker and snaps his cuffs out like a Vegas dealer leaving the table. Steps out into the world.

About Vince Camden: he is thirty-six and white. Single. Six feet tall, 160 pounds, broad-shouldered and thin, like a martini glass. Brown and blue, as the police reports have recorded his hair and eyes. His mouth curls at the right corner, thick eyebrows go their own way, and this casts his face in perpetual smirk, so that every woman who has ever been involved with him eventually arrives at the same expression, hands on hips, head cocked: Please. Be serious.

Vince is employed in midlevel management, food industry: baking division -- donuts. Generally, there is less to making donuts than one might assume. But Vince likes it, likes getting to work at 4:30 in the morning and finishing before lunch. He feels as if he's gotten one over on the world, leaving his place of employment for lunch and simply not coming back. He's realizing this is a fixed part of his personality, this desire to get one over on the world. Maybe there is a hooky gene.

Outside, he pulls the collar of his windbreaker against his cheeks. Cold this morning: late October. Freezing, in fact -- the steam leaks from his mouth and reminds him of an elementary school experiment with dry ice, which reminds him of Mr. Harlow, his fifth-grade teacher. Hanged himself after it became common knowledge that he was a bit too fond of his male students. Thirty-six.

It's a serene world from your front steps at 2:20 in the morning: dim porch lights on houses black with sleep; sidewalks split the dark dewed lawns. But the night has a grimmer hold on Vince's imagination, and he shivers with the creeping sensation -- even as he reminds himself it's impossible -- that he's on the menu tonight.

" So what ... YOU want me to do this thing or not?" The two men stare across the bench seat of a burgundy Cadillac Seville. The driver asks: "How much would something like that cost?"

The bigger man, in the passenger seat, is impatient, restless, but he pauses to think. It's a fair question. After all, it is 1980, and the service industries are mired in this stagnant economy, too. Are the criminal sectors subject to the same sad market forces: inflation, deflation, stagflation? Recession? Do thugs suffer double-digit unemployment?

Do criminals feel malaise?

"Gratis," quotes the passenger.

"Gratis?" repeats the driver, shifting in the leather seat.

"Yeah." And after a pause: "Means free."

"I know what it means. I was just surprised. That's all. You're saying you'll help me out with this guy for free?"

"I'm saying we'll work something out."

"But it won't cost me anything?"

"We'll work it out."

And it says something about the man driving the Cadillac that in addition to not knowing what the word gratis means, he also doesn't realize that nothing is free.