Note: This is the third of four posts on Donald Westlake’s 1977 collection of two novellas, Enough, reprinted by Hard Case Crime as Double Feature. The series covers the novellas and the movies based on them. Links to the other entries in the series are at the bottom of this post.
“Ordo,” the second of two novellas in Double Feature (previously published as Enough), is an entirely different animal than opener, “A Travesty.” While “A Travesty” is nearly novel length, “Ordo” is only seventy pages or so, and while “A Travesty” fits neatly into the comic crime portion of the Westlake canon, “Ordo” is an outlier that doesn’t draw easy comparisons to his other works.
Ordo Tupikos is a sailor in the US Navy. One day, one of his fellow sailors says, “You never said you were married to Dawn Devayne.”
Dawn Devayne is a hugely popular and famous movie star, and according to the article in the magazine Ordo’s fellow shipman is reading, used to be named Estelle Anlic. Ordo was married very briefly to Estelle when he was twenty-one. Estelle had said she was nineteen, but was only sixteen. Estelle’s mother had found them, and had the marriage annulled.
Ordo is familiar with Dawn Devayne. He’s even seen a couple of her movies. But the woman on the screen was so different from the Estelle he was once married to that he drew no association.
This throws him into a state of mental turmoil, so he cashes out his leave and goes to Hollywood to visit Dawn Devayne. She is willing to see him.
To point out the obvious from the names of the characters, Ordo represents the ordinary–he has a career, he is working towards retirement, and then he’ll get his pension and either retire or do something else. If the “de” in “Devayne” is French, she’s “of vanity.” She represents the glamour and superficiality of Hollywood that Ordo, and most of the rest of us, know little about beyond what we see or read in the entertainment press. “Ordo” is the story of what happens when these two worlds collide, when regular-Joe Ordo begins mingling in her ritzy world, and movie star Dawn Devayne is drawn, at least partially, back into the world of the rest of us.
“Ordo” is at least as much a meditation on the Hollywood life as it is a plot-driven story, and while it would be easy to imagine the comic possibilities of this setup in Westlake’s hands, it’s dead serious. Tonally, the closest comparison I can come up with in the Westlake catalog is his posthumously published Memory (which I have not written a review of yet). It’s a sad, human tale, and it’s easy to see why it was packaged with something more typical of the Westlake brand, not to mention more lighthearted.
Posts in this series:
- Review: Double Feature/Enough, part one – “A Travesty”
- Movie review: A Slight Case of Murder (1999), based on “A Travesty” by Donald Westlake
- Review: Double Feature/Enough, part two – “Ordo” (this post)
- Movie review: Ordo (2004), based on “Ordo” by Donald Westlake
As I said when I reviewed it, it fits pretty well with a lot of recurrent themes in Westlake’s work–actors, for one. So many actors in his books, including one who does armed robbery to support himself. Westlake married an actress, did a bit of acting himself as a young man, his very first series of novels built around one character were about an actor who has a lot of torrid affairs while learning his craft, and of course Memory is about an actor who suffers a grim fate because of his torrid affairs. Another would be showbiz, which ties in to acting–the artificiality of that world, but also the unexpected complexity of it.
And it all ties in to identity, his supreme obsession. How do you know who you are? So the idea is to contrast a remarkably grounded person, who has never once doubted who he is, with someone who intentionally jettisoned her former identity in favor of an invented persona that everyone thinks is her. It is, in fact, a murder mystery, and he’s the detective. Not nearly so much an outlier as it must have seemed, mainly because the comic aspect is so much on the down low, because Ordo has no sense of humor to speak of. Maybe humor is something we created to deal with our various identity confusions, and since he has none, he doesn’t need it.
And the reason the two books go together pretty well is that the protagonist of the other, who has a great sense of humor, has no idea who he is, and just accidentally slips into solving murders he doesn’t really care about, having committed one himself. His identity is fluid, Ordo’s is set in stone. And who does Ordo most resemble, of all Westlake’s best-known characters? Parker. Who also has a rock-ribbed sense of identity, and who also struggles to understand all the confused people around him, including Grofield–who ends up in a pretty bad place in his last appearance.
I think Ordo is who Westlake wished he could be, Carey who he thought he was much closer to being–and the same goes for Parker and Grofield. Dortmunder is somewhere in-between. He’s not saying everybody should or could be like Ordo. He is saying that in many ways, it’s better to be happy with who you are, something an actor probably can never be, or he/she wouldn’t be in that profession.
(Actually, that’s pretty much what Tarantino was saying with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but that’s another story.)
Ordo is one of my favorite of Westlake’s. Possibly my favorite, but it’s not typical Westlake. Even considering Westlake wrote more widely than just the comic heist novels that he is known for, this is pretty unusual for Westlake and shows just how wide his range really is.