The Tenth Circle

Midway along the journey of his life, Nick Tosches woke to find himself in a dark wood, for he had wandered from the straight path.

That straight path was a long record of obsessively researched and rhapsodically written studies of figures from popular culture: Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, boxer Sonny Liston and others. Tosches’ sympathy for his haunted subjects, combined with his writerly exuberance--he sometimes seemed to be careening through his own prose at 100 miles an hour, with only his trusty thesaurus for ballast--made for aerobic, exhilarating reading that might best be described as gonzo biography.

The dark wood in which this brooding, iconoclastic son of Newark’s mean streets now finds himself is “In the Hand of Dante,” a novel that juxtaposes the tale of the Italian poet’s struggle to complete his masterwork, “The Divine Comedy,” with a modern caper involving the theft of that book’s original manuscript by bloodthirsty New York City gangsters. It’s a brilliant idea, rife with all sorts of opportunities for thematic linkage: the paralleling, for instance, of Dante’s intricately rendered blueprint of an infernal underworld with the bada-bing version inhabited by La Cosa Nostra, or maybe an exploration of contemporary vulgarity’s connection to the vulgate in which the poet worked. Any writer with a literary bent, a flair for perverse comedy and an understanding of the ways of mobsters and crooks (along with Tosches, Elmore Leonard comes to mind) could have a blast with a milieu this promising.

Alas, Tosches has taken this truly great idea and squandered it. “In the Hand of Dante,” to put it quite plainly, is a mess of a book. Reviewers sometimes graciously qualify that epithet--”a well-intentioned mess,” “a beautiful mess”--but, sadly, no such qualifiers apply here. The author’s intentions are dubious, and there is scant beauty to be found in passages that alternate between cartoonishly gruesome violence, excruciatingly long and impenetrable discourses on cabalistic numerology and the purple musings of Dante Alighieri as imagined by his impassioned scholar.

Here, sort of, is what happens. When an appropriately Mephistophelean gangster named Joe Black learns that the original manuscript of “The Divine Comedy” may be sitting in a wooden box just outside Palermo, he dispatches his pathologically violent henchman, Louie, back to the old country to retrieve it. Since neither Joe Black nor Louie is equipped to vouch for the manuscript’s authenticity once it has been secured, they must turn to the writer Nick Tosches, who has not only written “In the Hand of Dante” but is one of the novel’s two main characters as well.

With Louie, Nick heads off to Italy, where, after taking part in the manuscript’s theft, he watches his new partner brutally gun down an aging mafia don, a priest, a woman and a dog in order to leave absolutely no witnesses. To Nick’s eyes, their prize appears to be the genuine article, though he knows that it won’t be salable until it has been authenticated by more official sources. Nick takes the manuscript to a number of Italian archives and libraries, then on to Chicago, where it is subjected to the most advanced and rigorous compositional analysis in the world. (Apparently you can just call the place and make an appointment. Who knew?) Once he’s absolutely sure that he’s in possession of the real thing, he meets up with his gangster cohorts and settles up with them in a way that will come as a surprise only to those who have never encountered a single snippet of “The Godfather.”

Far worse than all of the novel’s senseless violence is all of the senseless nonviolence. Even the gentlest of readers may find themselves welcoming the arrival of chapters that track Nick’s descent into this inferno of his own making: At least they make sense. Those passages that attempt to show Dante’s inner turmoil as he consults with an ancient Jewish sage, obsesses over the number three and its mystical multiples, pines for his beloved Beatrice and is eventually thrust into exile are painfully overwrought, chockablock with laughably convoluted writing. Like this, for instance: “That the most innocent child should be stilled and taken to grave seemed to him empirical proving enough that the unheeding and inviolate will of God, which we should pray only to serve, could not be bent by even the purest, guileless, sincerest, and humilisimus of askance for the good either of a single unborn soul or of all mankind.” That’s a typical sentence. I’m not kidding.

Tellingly, the only part of “In the Hand of Dante” that works is a section that has no place whatsoever in the story, a lengthy excoriation of the various editors and publishers who have wronged Tosches over his 30-year literary career. With all the misappropriated fervor of Lenny Bruce railing against the government in his comedic swan song or perhaps Ezra Pound denouncing the usurers from his asylum bed, Tosches lashes out at all of those shortsighted souls who would dare to compromise his art by editing his vision. This crazed digression has a vituperative intensity that gives it real life and thus distinguishes it from any other part of the book.

Maybe Nick Tosches’ editor, fearing such blistering censure, simply decided that the lightest of touches was called for when marking up the proofs of “In the Hand of Dante.” It’s anybody’s guess why this novel is the mess that it is, instead of the triumph that it could and should have been. It’s not because Tosches is a bad writer; he’s actually a good one, even a very good one, when he exercises some self-control. No one was asking him to compose “In the Hand of Dante” in terza rima, or anything like that. But readers do have the right to ask authors to try harder than this.