[In the positive review below, Crews commends the true-to-life narrative and characterization in Save Me, Joe Louis, observing that Bell is "an exceptional novelist … [capable] of occasionally turning a miracle."]

Madison Smartt Bell has written an episodic novel of two grifters and drifters, Charlie and Macrae, whose only thought seems to be to drink and dope a bit today and tomorrow. After tomorrow, they'll turn their attention toward relieving an unsuspecting citizen of enough money so they can drink and dope a bit one more time. Always one more time. Charlie, in his early 40's, is an ex-con and Macrae, hardly more than 20, is AWOL from the Marines.

Never once in Save Me, Joe Louis do they have a thought of getting a job, or of giving up the grift, quitting the scam, abandoning the occasional low-rent mugging or dropping the habit of stealing a car for a few days. While these two men are not stupid, they are not very bright either. To make it worse, they are totally alienated from society, alienated from the criminal subculture in which they live their lives and, most devastatingly, alienated from their own selves.

These two predators on the weak and unsuspecting think of themselves as pretty good guys. I don't find that very strange. As James Baldwin put it in his introduction to his play Blues for Mr. Charlie, "No man is a villain in his own heart." Just so. Charlie and Macrae have their own valid—at least to them—reasons for what they do. Their view of the world, and their understanding of it, seems reasonable to them. It is the quintessentially recidivist con's mentality, a mentality so ordinary and common in this society that it keeps all our jails full to overflowing.

Save Me, Joe Louis is Mr. Bell's ninth book in a decade—he's published seven novels and two collections of short stories—and it is not his first trip to the hairy underbelly of society in search of a story. He seems to have an overwhelming affinity for that level of existence where the qualities of which novels are normally made are missing—qualities of mercy and love and compassion and sacrifice and most of the other abstractions you've ever heard.

It would seem reasonable that the next sentence I ought to write would be something like: "And consequently, Madison Smartt Bell has written another bad novel." Not so. He has not to this point written his first bad novel, so far as I'm concerned. In Save Me, Joe Louis, Mr. Bell has taken the artist's shaping magic and transformed a totally unpromising narrative into something of value.

The narrative of Save Me, Joe Louis is sorry enough. Charlie and Macrae meet in the dead of winter in New York's Battery Park, where they try to panhandle each other. Neither of them has any "spare" change for the other, so they decide to do what they do best: take the money from the next people they meet, in this case a couple of college kids out on a date. Charlie and Macrae become friends and steal together, dope together and drink together. In the process, a teen-age prostitute is brutally slain, and so is her pimp, Big Tee. It is not long before they draw so much heat (they are not the most skillful bad guys in the world) that they have to steal a car and head south. They end up in Baltimore, where they meet a black ex-con named Porter and the three of them steal (among a great many other things) a lot of guns and Charlie blows away some cops.

This is when Porter tells a too-good-to-be-true story you often hear in the Deep South: "'I heard this story,' Porter said,' Back when the gas chamber was new, you know? Go back 40 years or whatever. First dude they threw in there, one of the first. Somewhere down south, I guess it was. Anyway, they wanted to see how it would go, so they had some kind of a window they could look at him through, and they put a microphone in there with him….

"'Save me, Joe Louis,' Porter said. 'That's all they got. Over and over, just like that. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis.'"

There's nothing to do but steal another car and run again, this time to a little farm in the hills of Tennessee where Macrae was raised and where his blind daddy still lives. There, and in South Carolina, where Charlie was born, the novel is resolved, insofar as such a story line admits of resolution. The men are doomed, they know it, they have always known it, and they accept it.

Macrae is left with the greatest possibilities. He is back home with a woman who may or may not save him. Most important, he likes being back home and has no desire to return to the dirty, bloody, noisy big cities, and certainly he has no desire for the life he has left behind him on the mean streets of those cities. But the trail he has left behind him is hot. He knows it and we know it. He, too, is doomed.

The two men at the heart of this story are not the first doomed men to populate a novel and make it pulse with life. Mr. Bell's ability to render the look and smell and sound and even at times the taste or place, his vision of human experience being no more than dust blown in the winds of chance, and finally his determination never to make the life of the novel have more symmetry and sense than flesh and blood normally have, make him the exceptional novelist he is, and also make him capable—in his best moments—of occasionally turning a miracle. Save Me, Joe Louis is a remarkable read. I encourage people everywhere to go out and put their money down and take this book home.