BookReviewOfTheForceByJanemaslin

THE FORCE 

By Don Winslow 

479 pp. William Morow. $27.99.

“How do you cross the line?” asks the main character in “The Force,” Don Winslow’s shattering New York cop epic about an elite task force leader who’s a hero until he’s not. The simple answer is, “Step by step.” But this boisterous, profane book isn’t big on simple answers.

“The Force” recalls Sidney Lumet’s great New York police films (“Serpico,” “Prince of the City”) and makes their agonies almost quaint by comparison. Winslow’s novel takes place in 2017, but he doesn’t frame it as a time of good cops and bad cops, black or white. He paints a realistic tableau of police privilege, pragmatism, racial bluntness, street smarts, love of partners and loyalty to what they call the Job. The Job — and those partners — had better pre-empt everything else in an elite cop’s life.

Detective First Grade Dennis John Malone is the story’s arrogant hero, a case study in how unbearable pressure can push even the most idealistic guy on the Manhattan North Special Task Force to destroy everything he holds dear. The unit is fictitious, and so is Denny, but they don’t sound that way. Fresh off “The Cartel,” with its knowing descriptions of brutality in a Mexican drug cartel, Winslow makes a cowboy style of New York law enforcement sound only slightly less rogue. He depicts the task force as a wild pack of alphas, brothers in both ingenious crime-fighting and wild celebration.

“The Force” begins with an ominous glimpse of Denny in captivity, weighed down not only by the possibility of prosecution but also by the burden of his everlasting shame. It will take a while to figure out how this happened. First we need to spend some riotous time getting to know his routine, his tricks, his snitches and his blood brothers. The team consists of the Irish Denny; his closest friend, an Italian named Russo (ethnicity and race are all-important and always mentioned); the one black partner and obligatory guy near retirement, Montague; and Levin, the Jewish newbie, who is squeaky-clean and vows never to do any of the shocking things that are routine to the other three. His plan to keep his nose clean lasts about three minutes in Winslow time, since “The Force” is a fast-paced but fairly long book.

Their bond on so-called Bowling Nights — no wives, steak-eating as a show of force, mandatory brothel visits, etc. — trumps anything else they do. In a wonderful comic sequence that takes place on one of these outings, the three core members of the team (a fourth dies early in the book) haze Levin by ordering him to arrest a mob big shot dining in the same restaurant where they’re all spending the evening. These cops laugh themselves silly — and live in a world where the mob guy thinks it’s funny, too. Cops, gangsters, drug dealers, high-end madams: They all turn out to be in business together. They’ve found a way to be the best and worst simultaneously.

“The Force” is driven by the fact that this situation can’t last forever. It has always been standard practice for these guys to take bribes. It’s just the way business is done on their turf. But under Denny Malone, they have branched out into much more dangerous territory, and it becomes increasingly hard for them to explain, even to themselves, why they’re any better than the dealers and thugs they’re policing. Here’s where the serious trouble begins. It’s one thing for Denny to hurt himself. It’s quite another for him to risk bringing down the people he loves most in the world.

Denny has a white wife and children in a house on Staten Island. He also has a beautiful black girlfriend, a nurse who loves jazz and unfortunately also loves heroin, in Harlem. He has come to think of Staten Island as another planet, and Harlem as his home turf, but his self-deluding streak is just another wrenching part of his character. He can’t possibly be clear about what he really cares about — or about who really cares about him.

“The Force” has a lot of exposition to get through in its initial pages. Denny’s background is kept deliberately incomplete, because key parts of it are needed for the book’s cinematic denouement. There are many characters and locations and illicit police habits to introduce.

But the pace is kept up by the Winslow way with words, which almost entirely defies being quoted here, either because of the slang (Elmore Leonard league) or because of the everyday obscenities that lace every funny line. The best I can do is paraphrase a night of task force revelry that ends with the “over-refreshed” team riding down Lenox Avenue at daybreak, windows open, blasting N.W.A’s hit about the police and “yelling to the few startled people on the sidewalks.” What tha police? Police act this way? Yes, and much, much worse. And in retrospect, this will turn out to have been the best night they ever spent together.

The Force

By Don Winslow

479 pages. William Morrow and Company. $27.99