The Ax

When asked by a student what it takes to be enlightened, a great spiritual teacher replied: "You must want God as much as a drowning man wants air."

Once, as a teenager, swimming in the rough waves of the ocean, a panic-stricken white haired geezer grabbed my arm and cried out for help. In that instant I knew what it meant for someone to want air so badly he would have pulled me under so he could continue breathing.

The narrator of Westlake's tale, Burke Devore, is one such drowning man gasping for air. In Bruke's case, drowning is being over fifty and unemployed with a wife and kids. Air is a job.

Burke has spent his entire career as a polymer paper specialist. Its the 1990s, the post-Reagan years - he was downsized along with hundreds of show more other dedicated employees many months ago. The money is about to run out. Burke stands to lose his nice house in Connecticut, his car, his possessions, any remaining shred of respect from his family. As far as Burke is concerned, he stands to lose his life. No doubt about it, Burke Devore needs a job. Fast.

After trying to win a job these past months their way, the way society says you have to win a job, Burke realized the odds were stacked way too high against him, too many other equally qualified job hunters in his specialized field and too few companies looking to fill his position.

Burke Devore knows what he has to do. He goes up to the attic, locates the chest with the Luger pistol his father brought back from Germany as a souvenir after the war. He sets his plan in motion, a plan to pinpoint those other qualified job hunters competing for a polymer paper manager job, his job.

Can he really do it, kill off the competition? With his very life on the line, you bet he can.

American author Donald E. Westlake wrote The Ax at age sixty-five, with more than forty published novels to his credit. Mr. Westlake brings a true writer's wisdom to this work I judge an overlooked classic. Through the magic of entering the heart and mind of Burke Devore, the author makes credible the incredible, plausible the implausible, how an everyday kind of guy, a law abiding citizen can take drastic measures to reclaim his life.

You read The Ax with a combination of shock and fascination. Your jaw drops. Can this really be happening? It can. And the more pages you turn, the more you appreciate the tale's black humor. Wow! Donald E. Westlake. Why haven't I heard of this guy before?

And there's such an acid critique of society. Burke Devore reflects on capitalism's underbelly, how politicians, stockholders and the CEOs are the real enemy. The rich don’t care about a workforce toiling, bleeding sweat and sweating blood to keep their company in the black. Not one bit. What the rich at the top care about is maximizing profit. If merging with another company or moving their plant overseas can squeeze out the most profit, that’s what they’ll do. Thousands of men and women who have created a life around their job means nothing. Let them and their families eat cupcakes. Don't go away mad, gang, just go away.

Burke cracks a wry smile. Fortunate in years past for those blue collar types, steel worker, miners, factory workers - when automation hit and they could be replaced by machines, at least they were unionized. But nowadays when computers replace white collar middle managers like himself, no unions. Your education and professionalism, so the theory goes, gives you benefits enough. What a joke.

Stopping to fuel up his car, Burke considers another solution to his problem: banditry. Simply pop into a convenience store like this one with a Pakistani behind the counter, point the Lugar at his face and demand all the cash in the till. He could rob such a convenience store once a week until Social Security kicks in. Now that’s convenient!

No, that's not the solution. Burke knows the solution.

To find out how Burke will fair in his role as a methodical serial killer, I highly recommend reading The Ax. Middle America never had a more articulate spokesperson.



American author Donald E. Westlake, 1933 - 2008 show less

Burke Devore used to be a middle manager at a paper company, describing his job as being "above the working stiffs, but capable of communication with them, so the bosses won't have to deal with people who play country music on their car radios." But he was "downsized," and has been looking for a new job for two years, growing increasingly frustrate. It's hard when you're middle-aged, and there are so many other workers competing for the same managerial jobs in the paper industry. Ultimately, he devises a scheme to make his resume stand out: eliminate the competition. He cleverly manages to discover the identities of his competitors and sets out to eliminate them, one by one.

This was a clever and diverting crime novel. It is the first show more book I've read by Westlake, but won't be the last. He reminded me a bit of Patricia Highsmith. And, it was not just a crime novel, but and underhanded critique of our society and corporate greed.

3 stars show less

An impressive application of two kinds of logic to the life of a downsized middle management worker who on losing his job finds all that he understood about his social world undermined to the point of vanishing: the logic of the hard-boiled noir thriller, and the logic of corporate capitalism. In each, it is understood that the only consideration is the bottom line. Westlake's achievement is to embody this realization in the voice of his middle-class protagonist, to to set it forth in his clean direct prose.

Do the ends justify the means? That's the issue at the crux of "The Ax" by Donald Westlake. What would you do if you were "downsized?" How far would you go if you were out of a job for two years? Burke Devore decides to eliminate the competition, and goes about it in brutal fashion. Along the way, Westlake offers a fascinating look inside the head of a desperate man, and looks at how his life has been changed, and how he is still changing it. It's a really well-written book, and deserves every one of the rare five stars I've given it.

A professional gets laid off, then takes his career in his own hand, proactively ensuring that he gets the job he feels most qualified for. That he does all this by resorting to a string of murders might be taking the self-help, proactive view of job searching a little to extremes, you think?

Yes, like so many of the other reviewers have said before, the entire plot was rather disturbing. I mean murder for gain? Even the non-religious and anarchists don’t condone that. But, not because the passages recounting the murders were so brutal and descriptive that it kept me awake at night. And, not because violence is as integral to each chapter as blood and gore to a George Romero film. What sticks in my mind is how easily the ‘protagonist’ arrived at murder as the answer to his problems, and the rationalization that there are real people out there that think the same way.

The book is written in a common, everyday prose that makes reading comfortable. There’s no need to keep a dictionary handy for this one. It’s doubtful show more that you’ll come across more than one or two words you’ll want to add to your personal vocabulary. That’s not to say that it wasn’t well written, or entertaining. I found it to be both. What I found to be greatly lacking, crying for a rewrite, was the ending. Think of a movie where the villain has been pursued by the law through the entire film. In the closing scene he hangs by a rope over a chasm 1,200 feet deep. He looks into the camera and says, “You think I’m trapped, but you’ll never get me.” The screen turns black and the credits start scrolling. Yeah, it’s just like that.

Look, this book is not going to be mistaken for one of literature’s great works. No one is going to believe that it was written under one of Stephen King’s pseudonyms. And, I don’t believe that fans of the author have formed a group, demanding a sequel. It was a quick, easy read that I pretty much enjoyed except for an ending that left me hanging like a bed sheet on a backyard clothes line in January. Consequently, three stars. show less

Unemployed for two years, a former paper executive sets out to kill the competition for his dream job. This reminds me of [A Simple Plan]. It's chilling ... especially when I realized that I was buying into his rationalizations! I will definitely read more of Westlake's work.