Review of "Rivers of Gold," by Adam Dunn

RIVERS OF GOLD

By Adam Dunn

Bloomsbury. 276 pp. $25

This being a political season, we are endlessly assured that recovery is near, that prosperity is just around the corner, that happy days will soon be here again . . . if we cast our ballots correctly. Adam Dunn, the author of this often brilliant first novel, "Rivers of Gold," is having none of it. He sets his story in Manhattan three years from now -- 2013 -- when the Great Recession has become the New Depression; famous restaurants, hotels, stores and theaters are shuttered; riots have broken out; a shantytown has sprung up in Central Park; and thousands of municipal employees, including police, have been laid off, sending the crime rate to new peaks.

But don't despair, folks: The Palin-Limbaugh ticket has just taken over the White House.

(Sorry, the devil made me write that last bit.)

Dunn's guide to this grave new world is green-eyed, 118-pound, 25-year-old Reynolds (Renny) Taylor, who divides his time between high-fashion photography and high-end drug-dealing. Both pursuits carry him into a world of hip young things with money, and both help him maintain a frenzied sex life. The novel's early sections suggest an updating of the urban decadence we've seen before in books like Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" and Bret Easton Ellis's "Less Than Zero." Dunn's young people frequent illegal clubs and slurp down drinks that you and I never heard of ("ginger-pear-basil-aspic martinis," "truffle-oil infused Absolut 100 shots"). But there's a new desperation here: "Life in the Big Apple in 2013 isn't about pride or principles," Renny tells us, "it's about survival."

Dunn finds a certain mad humor in Renny's hectic life. The lad often speeds about the city in taxis and has developed rules for Taxi Sex, which are highly practical but mostly unrepeatable here. Renny actually gets sweet on a tawny beauty he calls N (he gives women letters, which is slightly more gentlemanly than numbers), who has "AETAS ANIMA" tattooed on an intimate portion of her anatomy. When N unwisely shows signs of possessiveness (she asks Renny how many women he's had sex with that month), he has his answer ready: "I think that people need to collide, to bounce off each other a few times, in order to determine if they're really a good fit for combining. If not, it's best to Keep Moving." A rule to live by, verily, but lest he alienate the delightful N, Renny gives her a gift that keeps on giving, a platinum-plated vibrator. Dunn's sex scenes are a highlight of the book; they provide tasty glimpses of the bizarre, rather than boring descriptions of the same-old same-old.

All this is good fun, if you're not uptight about sex, drugs and youthful decadence.

I could have happily gone on seeking vicarious thrills in Renny's orgiastic lifestyle, but Dunn has something more ambitious in mind. He wants to show us that Renny is an unwitting bit player in a much larger drama, and to do that, he introduces four more characters, two cops and two criminals. One of the cops is Detective Sixto Santiago, part of a plainclothes unit that tries to keep Manhattan at least safe for tourists; he's big, tough, cynical and honest. He's also most unhappy about being partnered with a gun-crazy madman named More, a one-time Special Forces sniper in Afghanistan who's been detailed by the Pentagon to the NYPD to seek out foreign influences in the New York drug trade.

Those influences do exist, in Reza, a Bulgarian immigrant turned taxi driver and drug kingpin who is Renny's drug boss, and in The Slav, once a bloodthirsty Russian commander in Chechnya, now the leader of an international crime syndicate in New York. These are ruthless men. The Slav, we're told, "looked like an early amphibian that had clawed its way out of the primordial sea, stood on dry land for the first time, and decided then and there that it all belonged to him." Poor Renny is soon running for his life.

Dunn takes pains to develop these cops and criminals; indeed, I think he tells us more than we need to know about most of them. Still, there is some wildly inventive writing in this novel -- "future noir" one early reader called it -- and we do find ourselves worrying about whether the relatively decent Renny can survive in this jungle. Dunn is a talented writer, and "Rivers of Gold" will be talked about, deservedly.

Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers regularly for The Post.