From the April 11, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.

Goo Book tells the story of a pickpocket and occasional driver for a mysterious man named Mishazzo. Mishazzo is a businessman of sorts, terse and intense. He has his driver take him all around London, sometimes for business deals, and sometimes for what seem to be intimidations or even assaults. The driver does not quite know what it is that Mishazzo does, he only knows that he may be dangerous.

When the story opens, the main character spends most of his time smoking pot with his girlfriend while sitting on the banks of a canal or stealing wallets from tourists. They have a strange, complex relationship; instead of talking about their feelings, they leave notes in a notebook back and forth. It lets them say the words they could never say aloud, and communicate the thoughts they might otherwise keep secret.

When he gets the chance to do more driving for Mishazzo, things seem to be going well until he is picked up by the police one day. The police tell the main character that they want information on Mishazzo – where he goes, who he talks to, dates, times, everything – and in return they won’t send him to prison for theft. He acquiesces because he has no other choice, and things slowly but surely start going bad.

Goo Book is told in spare, measured prose, almost entirely free of description. It is filled with a slow-burning intensity that builds as the main character’s situation becomes more dangerous. In a way it felt like a reversal of most crime stories I’ve read, which tend to have forceful main characters that fill every page with their personalities; here the main character and his girlfriend are practically ciphers, carefully hidden from view for most of the story. We only really get a peek into the main character’s feelings at the very end, when his paranoia reaches a fever-pitch and he makes a split-second decision whose repercussions hit him like a sledgehammer.

Overall I liked this story; it has a fairly simple plot, but the style drew me in, and the heart of the story is the character’s odd relationship with his girlfriend. It seems held together by the notebook where they write notes back and forth. It’s almost as though their feelings don’t truly exist if they aren’t written down in the book, and that writing them down is the only way that a man so compartmentalized could truly communicate.