Director’s Notebook
December, 2009
When you read certain books, do you sometimes imagine what it would be like as a movie? And if you do, do you imagine certain actors playing the book’s leading characters?
I couldn’t stop thinking of Johnny Depp as I read The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti. Depp has made a career playing charming rogues, untrustworthy and shady characters who are somehow beguiling as well. This is a pretty good description of Benjamin Nab, one of the leading characters in The Good Thief.
The Good Thief is set in the mid-nineteenth century, before the Civil War, in a New England that is an uneasy conglomeration of hard scrabble farms and labor intensive factories.
The story centers around Ren, a twelve year old inmate at St. Anthony’s Orphanage. Life is hard at the orphanage for everyone, but especially for Ren who is missing one of his hands and who therefore has no hope of ever being adopted by one of the local farming families.
More than anything Ren wants to be part of a family, but when Nab turns up claiming Ren is his long lost brother, Ren soon learns that the mystery of his lost family is far from solved. Unwillingly he helps Nab with his many schemes to defraud unsuspecting farmers. When that business goes sour, Nab turns to a much more unsavory profession, to Ren’s horror.
Along the way Ren meets a murderous giant, a mysterious dwarf, a rough but kindly landlady,
a disgraced school teacher, and a group of young girls known as the Mousetrap girls because they labor hour after hour at the town’s only industry, a large and forbidding factory that produces mousetraps. In every face Ren looks for a friend or a lost family member. As the story progresses he learns that his heartfelt desire to be part of a family has led him to a dangerous and deadly place.
This is Tinti’s first novel, and it is a credit to her vivid imagination, whirlwind pacing, and remarkable characters that she has been compared to Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Of the two writers, her story reminds me more of Stevenson, since it involves a lonely boy caught up with rogues who tries very hard to maintain his values yet still survive in a dangerous world. The Good Thief is exciting and surprising right down to the very last chapter. It’s a page turner and a delight, especially for a wintry evening. And if someday some clever film studio decides to make it into a movie, I certainly do hope they contact Johnny Depp!
