James Lee Burke Again Explains Why American Writers Love Louisiana

Goodreads lists 250 novels set in Louisiana and the list is not complete.  Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin and Anne Rice come immediately to mind and set certain categorical standards, but in their wake are legions, including me.  I wrote An Unremembered Grave after spending twenty years visiting my pal Doug in Angola, frequently as the guest of Ann Butler at her plantation B&B in St. Francisville, Butler Greenwood.  I was and remain captivated by the complexity of Louisiana, its spirit and eerie allure.  But for the macho and more grossly accurate version of that writerly experience, nobody can hold a candle to James Lee Burke.

He gets it, gets its saint-and-sinner smile, its barely-dead ghosts and most of all, its demise beneath the wheels of change.  He gets that its messy, beautiful soul in all its outrageous excesses is the unvarnished soul of a country.

Now he’s written another novel.  Here’s my review of it.

Travel once again into a mythical and creepy-dangerous corner of Louisiana that exists only in the mind of Detective Dave Robicheaux, stand-up guy. Robicheaux and his equally stand-up-even-when-drunk best bro Clete Purcell are in their eighth decade and Dave’s damsel-in-distress daughter Alafair has to be pushing fifty by now, but hey, archetypes cannot age. They exist in a Jungian collective unconscious that author James Lee Burke navigates like William Blake on a Bird scooter in rush-hour traffic. Hang on for the ride!

Clete sees a man in jailhouse garb jump from a train into a river and beats himself up for 447 pages in hardback for not reporting the event. Ten days later, Dave, visiting a local-boy-now-Hollywood-maven in town to film parts of an astronomically expensive and symbolically significant movie, sees the corpse of a woman nailed to a cross floating in on the bay. By page 17 the jumper turns out to be Hugo Tillinger, an escaped convict accused of burning his house to the ground with his wife and ten-year-old daughter inside. One page later we learn that the crucified woman is 26-year-old Lucinda Arcenaux, who’s been working for the Innocence Project trying to help wrongfully convicted prisoners. Including Hugo Tillinger.

It’s a nice set-up, but don’t even THINK you’ve been handed the backbone of a story. More like the bones of a thumb and a kneecap from a different skeleton. There are quickly more (many more) murders, each bizarre, brutal and exquisitely described. The Crusader’s Maltese cross turns up in a baby’s amulet and elsewhere, as do some of the major arcana of the Tarot deck. There are so many plot threads and delectably-described characters (including Chester Wimple, a small, disturbingly childlike hit man who trusts no one but Wonder Woman), whole arsenals of lovingly identified weapons and ammo, ghosts, hallucinations, hookers, blues singers and references to AA, old movies and organized crime that a truly dedicated reader will record names and details on recipe cards, tack them to a wall and then spend weeks with colored string trying to track the connections.

The result will be an impenetrable mess, but as NYT reviewer Marilyn Stasio said of this book, “But does anyone really read Burke expecting a coherent narrative?”

No. We read Burke because his poetic flair touches an American cultural base of longing for an imagined past in which there actually were good guys who respected women, loved animals and children, and never hesitated to track down and kill bad guys. Also because of that brain-worm he describes in each of us, the one that secretly relishes at least the idea of sickeningly violent retribution.

Burke in the Robicheaux tales is sort of the American Janus – two sides of the cultural coin, beauty and beast, saint and sociopath. Required reading in a time governed by the worm.

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Charlie Hebdo

Like most Americans, until January 7th I was pretty much unaware of Charlie Hebdo despite spending a lot of time in France.  So I Googled it and got the idea.  Satire.  Political cartoons.  Gross political cartoons.  Lots of penises and anuses, hideous old women with saggy boobs, the sorts of caricatures found on the walls of jr. high boys’ bathrooms.  Offensive, even disgusting to most Americans, particularly women.  Clearly not my thing, but interesting in some weird, sociological way.

Charlie Hebdo, in a French cultural tradition that perhaps more than any other on the planet takes freedom of expression seriously, lampoons everything with boyish, scatological verve.  Politicians, writers, all religions, social movements, anything is fair game.  Nothing is spared; nothing is sacred.  And while the juvenile, bathroom-wall images are occasionally stomach-turning,  they’re meant to be.  They’re meant to shock, to demolish acceptable patterns of thought and make room for new ones.

Charlie‘s cartoons wouldn’t survive three minutes anywhere but France, where social awareness and social criticism are the national religion and ridiculed on its pages as often as any other.  They wouldn’t survive because they quite deliberately overstep the boundaries of acceptable public imagery.  (Father, son and holy ghost in sexual congress?  So over the top.)  But hey, I’ll take gross cartoons any day over one entire magazine office and a kosher grocery heaped with dead bodies.

Islamic radicals, Christian radicals, Jewish radicals, French cartoonist radicals – all have the right to espouse their ideas while the rest of us have the right to ignore them.  But those who attempt to seize social power through mindless slaughter rather than the exercise of intelligence are simply The Beast, primitive, barbaric and loathsome.

As a writer and member of civilized society, je suis definitely Charlie!

 

 

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Adultery, A Curious Pregnancy and Ben Franklin’s Sister Jane – All in Three Book Reviews!

Writing “real” book reviews, meant for public consumption, is a dicey business requiring the skills of a world-class diplomat. I write them occasionally, but writing reviews non-diplomatically and from a personal perspective seems like more fun. Here are some favorites from this week.

Karen Shepard

The Celestials, Karen Shepard

Wonderful, deftly nuanced historical fiction based on the (real-life) arrival of 75 young Chinese men to work in a shoe factory in North Adams, MA, in 1870. Slightly too much attention to labor unions for my taste, despite the fact that conflicts over cheap Chinese labor were largely responsible for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, prohibiting the immigration of Chinese citizens to the U.S. until 1943. Still, with a shameless lack of political corrrectness I skimmed those sections in order to hang on to the backbone story, which is intelligently drawn, compelling and shocking in that way that makes you wonder what will happen. (Not to give anything away, but there’s an adulterous, cross-cultural affair that symbolizes an atavistic fear underlying all racial conflict and gives the narrative a zingy urgency.) Main characters and era are so well-developed as to create the illusion that the reader is actually there and privy to the inner lives of both New England Victorians with their innocent, churchy good intentions, and Chinese immigrants whose difficult, wary grasp on survival in what amounts to a senseless, Alice in Wonderland American world, feels real. The author is Chinese American, which may account for the seeming accuracy and depth of that fictional Chinese experience.

Roland Merullo

Vatican Waltz, Roland Merullo

Comfortably agnostic, I probably wouldn’t notice if the Catholic Church vanished overnight. Nonetheless, I belong to a Catholic community for the sole reason that I want to support its three legally ordained priests – two married women and a gay man (who jokes that he really wanted to be a nun.) I’ve been waiting for a novel that would explore issues around the ordination of women, and so was eager to read this one, which purports to be about a young woman who feels that she is called to be a Roman Catholic priest. It isn’t. What it is, is an interesting spiritual essay dressed in a novel’s costume that doesn’t fit.

Protagonist Cynthia Piantedosi is a young Catholic woman who lives in a working class Boston community and may qualify as the most boring character in contemporary American fiction except when she’s interpreting spiritual matters. Her theology is quite expansive and lovely if not remotely Catholic or even Christian, so readers may be forgiven for wondering why on earth she wants to become a Roman Catholic priest. A broad hint that the novel isn’t really about women’s ordination may be found in the single sentence dismissing the existence of some 64 women in the U.S. alone who are legally ordained Roman Catholic priests. If interested, see http://www.romancatholicwomenpriests.org/.   Delete the already-weak novel plot, and the first 2/3 of the book could (and possibly should) be republished as a series of thoughtful spiritual impressions suitable for people of all (or no) religious persuasions.

But the final third? Disaster.

(Spoiler Alert) Cynthia goes to Rome with the intention to urge reconsideration of the Church’s obdurate refusal to ordain women. The streets are crawling with nasty Vatican henchmen out to kill her (as may have been the fate of her liberal priest advisor back in Boston), but she is spared because – although women aren’t supposed to be priests (silly girl!), they do have a spiritual calling. Women are called to get pregnant. Aarrgghh! Centuries of feminist struggle obliterated in one awful deus ex machina plot twist that hopelessly reinforces all institutional misogyny.  Cynthia, who has never had sex with anybody, is pregnant. And we’re back to square one.

Jill Lepore

Book of Ages;The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, Jill Lepore

I love this book, love the scholarship, love the footnotes and totally love the rascal intent behind 442 indisputably erudite pages about a woman of whom almost nothing is known and so, one might assume, almost nothing may be said.

Jane Franklin was Benjamin Franklin’s sister, six years his junior and said to have been his favorite sibling in a brood of seventeen. While “Benny” educated himself into history, “Jenny” (Jane) may or may not have been raped, but in any event married at fifteen (when according to Lepore the average age at marriage for women at that time was twenty-four) a worthless, improvident scoundrel named Edward Mecom to whom she bore twelve children, only one of whom survived her.

And that’s basically it. Jane lived in poverty, struggling to take care of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A miserable life despite Lepore’s rather twee attempts at romanticizing the experience. But Jane could read and write, and at times exchanged letters with Ben. Almost all of her letters are lost, but Ben carefully preserved his correspondence, including his responses to Jane. It is from Ben’s replies that Lepore constructs approximations of what Jane might have said in the first place, her “opinions.”

But the greater delight in this work, disparaged for some reason by significant reviewers, is to be found in Lepore’s attention to Jane’s milieu. This is history made fascinating, not the toxic litany of kings and wars to which we were all exposed. The houses, the streets and food and slang usages of the time are pulled from obscurity, explained, made enjoyable. Books Jane owned or may have read, printed sermons with which she may have been familiar, newspapers, essays and interesting philosophical debates that were common fare and in which her brother frequently offered his opinions, are included in Lepore’s conversational style. History here is anything but tedious!

Amid the riches in Book of Ages, I will restrain my enthusiasm to only two in the interest of space. The first is the intense interest in writing that flourished then. Standardized spelling was new and its use the mark of an educated person. (I can’t help but compare the social status associated with standardized spelling then, to the social status associated with cell phone texting now, in which standardized spelling has perished.) Books on how to write letters were widely read, with specific models for every conceivable sort of correspondence – mother to unmarried daughter, uncle to recently-apprenticed nephew, etc. There was even a model letter entitled, “A Father to a Daughter in Service, on hearing of her Master’s attempting her Virtue.” As girls usually received no formal education, most who could read and write knew nothing of standardized spelling and used the old method in which words were randomly spelled as they sounded. Thus a convention arose in which women were expected to apologize for their ignorance as a part of every letter they wrote. Jane Franklin doggedly observed the convention.

The other detail destined to capture my personal attention was the “madness” of Jane’s son, also named Benjamin for his famous uncle. Jane’s son was buffeted by a psychiatric illness long before his illness would bear any name other than “lunatick.” There was a hospital, America’s first, founded in the 1750’s with Benjamin Franklin included among its founders. It was in Philadelphia, called Pennsylvania Hospital and offered treatment to those suffering psychiatric illnesses, but only to those who could pay. Ben Franklin’s nephew Ben was never a patient there. Instead, Franklin made arrangements for his nephew to be “confined” in a “house” in Burlington (MA) from which, near Christmas in 1776, during the Battle of Trenton, young Ben escaped. Jane never heard from her son again and thought he was dead, although there is later evidence that he wasn’t. His ultimate fate is unknown. In the eerie way of these things, I’ll be in Burlington for a writer’s conference in July, and will walk the streets of a place I’ve never been, acutely aware of Jane’s son who ran from whatever wretched prison that “house” was, and into oblivion. Thanks to Jill Lepore, somebody will remember. I will.

The author is Professor of History at Harvard, Chair of Harvard’s History and Literature Program, recipient of significant awards and a Pulitzer nominee. Clearly, she’s paid her academic dues, waded through years of grueling graduate study and managed to rise to the top of a system so refinedly brutal that it’s ground countless others to pulp. I like to imagine that with this work she’s finally been able to write in her own voice, a superbly educated, intellectual woman’s voice, and in so doing to reset entirely the rubric for the writing of history.

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Love the Book but Not the Author?

Here is a literary crisis about which no one speaks – a fantastic book written by somebody you might, at least in private fantasy, be happy to draw and quarter.  In the (mythically) genteel world of books and writers, this crisis is properly resolved by absolute, dead silence.  The wonderful book gets not a syllable of hallowed “word of mouth” promotion from you; your lips are sealed.  You pen no review and provide no response whatever if the book or author is mentioned.  In this way you preserve the myth of writerly courtesy, but… you also fail the First Cause of the writing life, which is appreciation of good writing.  The conflict is thorny, irksome and tiring, but after days of brooding I have come down on the side of good writing.  Mostly.

So here’s the story.

Two weeks ago I was in Portland (OR), saw a book review in the local paper and was so drawn to the book that I immediately bought it on my Kindle and sat reading it all that rainy afternoon.  I read it again on the plane trip home, savoring the author’s near-poetic elegance and deep understanding of monsters who are human.  It is a tale told by a metaphorical prisoner on death row in a metaphorical prison he perceives to be enchanted, giving the book its title.  There are also the unnamed Fallen Priest, consigned to pastor this stony hell after a fall from grace, and The Lady, a death penalty investigator whose job it is to unearth the buried, grisly histories of condemned men.  (The author is a licensed investigator who specializes in death penalty cases.)

I love this book, regard it as one of the best I’ve read in decades, with personal good reason.  I’ve been a child abuse investigator and am painfully familiar with the horrors to which helpless, very young children may be subjected, damaging them for life.   I am also no stranger to the realities of prison.  For 17 years until his death, I was in weekly contact with a friend, a lifer in Louisiana’s maximum security prison.  I can state with authority that this author knows what she’s talking about and, more significantly, transcends both the gritty and the sensational to arrive at a philosophical flashpoint so deep and true as to be worthy of its own school of thought.  The book is magical, lyrical and uniquely real.  Reading it, I kept nodding, “Yes, yes, yes!”  I thought I’d write a long, glowing review even though writers aren’t supposed to write reviews.  I do it anyway if a book, especially by a little-known author, is really good.

But there was this problem.  The author has written other books, among them non-fiction anti-feminist polemic to which I take profound exception.  (Read:  I’d like to meet her in an alley somewhere, except she’s younger and a skilled amateur boxer (really) and I’d wind up in a body bag.)  It is inconceivable to me that any woman could fail to see the deadly impact of pornography on women and children, but this author attacks Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon for their early and groundbreaking work on porn.  Much worse, the author, with an obvious absence of research and scholarship, misrepresents and trashes feminist theorist Mary Daly, revered by women all over the world, who was also my friend.   For that, the author is, to me, forever damned and anathema.

Mary Daly

Still, last year she wrote a brilliant, beautiful book.  Its title is  The Enchanted.  Her name is Rene Denfield.

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Boomer Book Review

A Hook in the Sky  (Claude Nougat) is a hair-raising coming-of- (Baby Boomer) age story, but an exclusive focus on that dimension may obscure its delicious complexity.  Anne Korkokeakivi, writing for The Millions, notes that French novels tend to be “… dark, searching, philosophical, autobiographical, self-reflective, and/or poetic (without being overwritten).”  Author Nougat isn’t French (she’s Belgian), but her protagonist is, and the novel’s style fails none of these criteria.  Indeed, it reads like the haunting, subtitled movie you discuss with friends for months!

The principal narrator, Robert, casts light on a heretofore uncelebrated stage of life – the third.  He is retiring from a career at the U.N. and painfully unsure of his next step.  Kay, his American wife, is twenty years his junior and deeply involved in her work as the owner of a trendy New York art gallery.  The couple is childless, a decision made years earlier by Kay without Robert’s knowledge or consent, the revelation of which decision causes the couple to separate.  Robert is abruptly alone, trying to recapture an abandoned version of himself – the (traditional) artist he wanted to be before choosing a more practical career.  He may stay with that career as a consultant, but instead dives headlong into the unknown.

His story is direct, seemingly honest and never “overwritten.”  He describes exotic Italian locales, his loathing for Modernist art and details of his affairs with an old friend and the friend’s troubled daughter in a seductively boundaried style.  The reader, while mesmerized by the written proximity of sunlit Italian villas, the inner workings of the U.N., heady discourses on art and the palpable disintegration of a marriage, is nonetheless aware that much remains mysterious, unsaid.  Robert is a quiet man, and yet his story is borne forward with an impossible-to-put-down momentum.  Something is about to happen, and it does.

What happens is a fascinating shift, reminiscent of that in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  Once a straightforward, uncompromising tale of one (admittedly privileged and cultured) man’s transitional crisis, the novel suddenly blossoms into a sort of conceptual magic show.  It’s a wild ride into symbolic territory that may jar readers who were expecting either consistency or a sweet, comfortable ending.  After bitter confrontations over Kay’s passion for Modernist art, Robert uncharacteristically agrees to create a huge Modernist installation, a towering, dangerous, Escheresque maze of aluminum ladders rising to… a hook.  Unreachable but omnipresent, the hook both looms above and incites the conflicting struggles of the lives below.  Robert and Kay’s conflict over art reflects both their personal discord and a larger philosophical perspective from which Kay emerges monstrous, a shallow, desperate pawn in the capitalist game.  But neither does Robert emerge a hero.  He chronicles, but does not alter, the horrific/fantastic concluding events (unreported here to avoid spoiling their effect on readers).  Robert is Everyman, but an Everyman who can tell a story!

Digital publishing is still a chaotic undertaking and the text has some missing commas and an odd use of “news” as a plural noun (“The news today are promising.”), but these typographical glitches are few and subsumed in the multilayered intelligence of the book.  Ideal for book groups, A Hook in the Sky poses questions for which there may be no answers, but about which endless discussion will be compelling.

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