Have you ever seen the Charles Grodin-Robert De Niro movie “Midnight Run,” in which De Niro is a rough-and-tumble ex-cop bounty hunter hired to catch Grodin, a fastidious accountant with a heart of gold who stole from the mob, gave the money to the poor, went into hiding, and evaded a long line of successive goombahs hired to catch him, until the anti-goombah, De Niro, agreed to take the case? (They both win in the end, when Grodin forces De Niro to discover his own heart of gold and reveals that he didn’t give all of the money to the poor.) It’s a pretty great flick. Great after a fashion, anyway: the fashion of the buddy flick/road-trip movie, this one from the late eighties. Sure, there are other, better, artier, earlier examples of the genre (notably the Road to… series of seven films in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are a mismatched pair who have zany adventures), but “Midnight Run” is the one I have chosen to illustrate the current cross-country flight of two Scribner authors whose novels just came out in paperback. They—David Goodwillie and Aryn Kyle—both evidently wanting to mark the paperback releases of their books (Goodwillie’s “American Subversive” and Kyle’s “Boys and Girls Like You and Me”) in some grander fashion than is usually afforded the author of literary fiction (a smattering of poorly attended readings in malls, nights spent alone in Holiday Inns Express, if that is the correct pluralization)—decided to do it up in style: they threw a big sendoff party in NYC, and then they headed west.
[#image: /photos/590953c8c14b3c606c1042be]Their adventure is playing itself out on smaller screens than “Midnight Run” originally did, but it packs no less a punch: Goodwillie tweets, Kyle Tumbles, and dramatis personae emerge. As Kyle writes on her blog: “It’s a match made in Blog Heaven: We agree on almost nothing, but we photograph very well together.” Act I, Scene II from April 21st ilustrates:
Oh, come on. It’s funny. But in all seriousness, I really like what Goodwillie and Kyle have done: they’ve taken something that has become, due to the decline of bookstores and publishing budgets, a bit pathetic, and turned it, via friendship and social media, into something fun and cool. Or, vis-à-vis “Midnight Run,” the mob is the usual lameness of the book tour, which the clever protagonists are outrunning. See? Also, Goodwillie once wrote an exposé of the mob’s activities in New York’s Garment District.
To wrap it all up, the authors will hold a final reading back in the city this Thursday, the 28th—it’s at Book Court, in Brooklyn, at 7 P.M. Banter expected.
![[#image: /photos/590953c8c14b3c606c1042be]](https://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/davidandaryn.jpg){kind=link}