Marathon Man

Thomas Levy, called Babe, is a history graduate student in New York, a distance runner, and preoccupied with his father's suicide after being destroyed by McCarthyist accusations.

His older brother Doc works in a branch of American intelligence Babe knows nothing about. When Doc is attacked, Babe is left holding information he does not have and cannot supply.

He knows nothing, which is the one thing nobody interrogating him will believe.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel's most effective idea is that Babe genuinely has no information, and that his ignorance is indistinguishable from resistance.

The interrogation cannot be satisfied because there is nothing to extract, and the horror comes from a question that has no answer being asked repeatedly.

The antagonist is a former Auschwitz dentist, living in South America, who has come to New York to retrieve diamonds taken from prisoners.

He is elderly, precise, physically unimpressive and entirely without hesitation, and Goldman writes him as a practical man doing a routine errand.

The interrogation conducted with dental instruments and the repeated question is among the most famous sequences in popular fiction and is genuinely difficult to read.

Its power comes from the ordinariness of the equipment and from the antagonist's calm, and Goldman keeps it shorter than its reputation suggests.

Babe's distance training, his admiration for Abebe Bikila, and the physical discipline of it are established throughout and become practically important.

The motif is not decorative: the novel's resolution depends on a capacity built across two hundred pages of apparently incidental material. Goldman also uses it to establish Babe's relationship with his father, since the running is inherited, which does character work while setting up the plot.

Babe's academic work concerns political persecution and his father's destruction by anti-communist investigation, and the novel connects American and Nazi material deliberately.

The argument — that the machinery of persecution is transferable — is present throughout and is stated more directly than a thriller usually permits.

The first third establishes two apparently unconnected narratives, and the convergence is delayed longer than a modern thriller would allow.

The patience pays off, and the moment the two threads meet is among the most effective in this section. Goldman also withholds the connection deliberately, and several readers have described putting the book down during the first third before it resolves.

He was a screenwriter as well as a novelist, with Butch Cassidy and All the President's Men among his credits, and he adapted this himself.

His screen background is visible in the construction and in the dialogue, and his book on the film industry is among the best written about it.

Fast, colloquial and fond of short paragraphs and direct address, with an unusual willingness to break into the second person.

The style is more mannered than the genre standard and is consistently effective, particularly in the sequences from Babe's perspective. He also uses very short chapters and occasional single-line paragraphs, and the rhythm is noticeably faster than the thrillers of its period.

John Schlesinger's 1976 adaptation, with Goldman's screenplay, is very close to the book and is how most people know the story.

The novel's ending differs and is considerably harsher, and Goldman has written about the change. Laurence Olivier's performance as Szell has largely fixed the character publicly, and the film's version of the interrogation is close to the novel's.

Goldman wrote a follow-up, Brothers, which is generally regarded as substantially weaker and which revises the first book's ending.

Readers are best served treating this as standalone, which it is entirely adequate as. Goldman wrote it more than a decade later and has said relatively little about it, and it is out of print in most territories.

Readers who want a thriller with a genuine historical argument and a protagonist who is not equipped for the situation.

It is short, extremely tense and among the best-constructed books in this section. Readers who know only the dental scene will find the surrounding novel considerably more substantial than its reputation.