It's not the comic Robert De Niro of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle or Meet The Fockers that permeates Rawi Hage's worthy debut novel, De Niro's Game (Harper Perennial, 273 pp., $13.95), newly released in paperback. Though De Niro himself makes no direct appearance, the book's lush coloration, urgent atmosphere and bleak plot all allude to, and take obvious inspiration from, the Oscar-winner's performance in Mean Streets, Martin Scorcese's groundbreaking 1973 motion picture.
Like Mean Streets, Hage offers a concentrated portrait of small-time hoods and their violent, parochial enclave, though instead of Little Italy we get Christian East Beirut. George and Bassam, the two sensitively-drawn thugs at the book's center, are childhood friends now in their early 20s. Silhouetted against "10,000 falling bombs," they lead a marginal existence motorcycling through Beirut's trash-strewn streets and pursuing various criminal enterprises. George, nicknamed De Niro, is the more violent of the two; like Johnny Boy, De Niro's pathological character in Mean Streets, he is chaos incarnate. Bassam is the more philosophical narrator, both observing and participating in the city's strife. Neither has parents or allegiances to religion or ideology—or to anything much beyond themselves.
As the wider world of corrupt militias and regional conflict increasingly strains their slum friendship, tension mounts between George and Bassan, and De Niro becomes less a role model than a state of mind, an inability to distinguish reality from imagination. In a moment of painful confession, George describes participating in one of the country's atrocities: "It was like being in a Hollywood movie." Will Lebanon's civil war consume both George and Bassam? Will Bassam flee for Paris? What effect do their harrowing existential experiences ultimately have on them? The book explores these issues deftly.
Though occasionally Rawi's imagery is a bit awkward or overwrought—as when he compares the faithful to "horses, carrying shopping bags" or notes that death comes "to scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood"—it also feels of a piece with the book's authentic qualities. The lyrical evocations of war-ravaged Beirut are, for the most part, highly effective. In a way that fans of De Niro will appreciate, the author locates credible beauty amid literal and moral squalor.
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