Celestin, Ray: Mobsters Lament (City Blues Quartet)
Whoops. Forgot to write about this after I finished it a few weeks ago. Celestin continues to follow the path of the black diaspora in North America, this time taking us from Chicago to New York. He paints a lively and convincing panorama of the Gotham of the immediate post-war years, from Brooklyn docks to gangster-inhabited penthouses to bebop clubs in Harlem. Our understanding of the regular characters deepens, and we are happy to see Louis Armstrong once again make an unobtrusive appearance.
Next stop: Los Angeles.
French, Tana: In the Woods: A Novel (Dublin Murder Squad)
I've read a couple of Tana French's standalone novels and admired them for her willingness to allow things to move very slowly. In an artistic world in which suddenness and shock are valued it is nice to see a writer push back against that. Seeing that French's deliberateness of pace seems to be almost a trademark, I was interested to see what her version of a police procedural would be like, and thus I opened the first in her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods. I must confess that, in a context where things generally move at a sprightlier pace, I found myself wanting things to move a little faster, but that was only at first. Once I had let go of my expectations of the form I settled down and enjoyed turning, deliberately, the pages. I especially admired French's misdirection. The mystery that we think will be solved by the end of the book is simply given up on as unsolvable, and the crime that the murder squad detectives are working on is resolved in a way that is satisfyingly inconclusive. It's hard to see where French will go, with her eminently dislikable protagonist, from here, but there are, I think, five more books in the series so go she does.
Harvey, Alex: Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles (Reverb)
This is a good overview of Tom Wait's career up to around "Swordfishtrombones." Waits is an interesting enough guy, and Alex Harvey a skillful enough writer, that one isn't really disappointed that the book is about eighty-five percent Waits and only fifteen percent "the spirit of Los Angeles." Likewise, one isn't too bothered by odd errors that suggest that Harvey is much more interested in and up to speed with Waits than in the metropolis and its literature, the raw materials that made Waits possible. (Homer Simpson—no relation to the character of the same name on a popular animated TV series—is an important character in Nathaniel West's classic LA novel, The Day of the Locust, but he is not an artist or the protagonist of the book as Harvey claims.) There's no evidence Waits or his partner and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who, Harvey rightly recognizes, reinvigorated Wait's work and perhaps even saved his life, talked to him at all; Harvey did a good job with what he had.We're left eager for their version, but maybe they've been giving us their version all along, in the art.
Miskowski, S.P.: Knock Knock (Skillute Cycle)
I haven't read a horror novel since . . . maybe I've never read a horror novel. (Surely Frankenstein doesn't count.) I heard about this one from an acquaintance on Twitter, and thought I might as well try something different. I'm not sorry I did, because in addition to the, well, horror, there's an excellent picture of life in the Pacific Northwest and—if a man can get away with saying this—what seems like an excellent depiction of what it's like to grow up and live female. The novel follows three girls in the small Washington town of Skillute from the time they innocently perform a half-understood ritual in the forest (this is a horror novel, after all) in the late 1960s up through the present day, though actually not all the girls make it that far. We come to know and care about these girls and then women through alternating sections devoted to each of them. Most interesting, perhaps. is the dreadful thing that is at the root of the horror Miskowski gives us: an alien life invading and then emerging from your body: pregnancy and childbirth. That's what the initial ritual is meant to ward off, and it's from this that the horror emerges.
von Reinhold, Shola: Lote
To misquote Eliot Weinberger, this is not a novel about someone "getting divorced in Connecticut [written] by someone . . . getting divorced in Pennsylvania." That is, it is not conventional lit-fic. It is, instead, a work that is informed by literature, art, and theory. The protagonist, Mathilda, is a black Briton fascinated by the bright young things, a group of flamboyant and mostly gay socialites on the scene in the 1920s and 30s. She notices that in their milieux, and among the somewhat more restrained Bloomsbury bunch, people with her pigmentation are, to say the least, underrepresented. She begins to look for them and, finally focusing on an (imaginary) black poet named Hermia Druitt, sets out in search of this Afro-Scottish artist who, Shola von Reinhold convinces us, hobnobbed with BYTs and Bloomsberries alike. Mixing actual scholarship with historically grounded fiction, von Reinhold lets us follow Mathilda on her quest. Mathilda's efforts to bring attention to the forgotten Druitt remind us of actual black artists whose lives and works have been suppressed.
West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust (New Directions Paperbook)
The Day of the Locust is one of those novels that gets better with every reading. Thanks to West's ruthlessness and the clarity of his vision it is certainly the best Hollywood novel we have seen or are likely to see. And in the great mob scene that closes the novel can any contemporary reader fail to see a Trump rally?:
" . . . the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious . . . all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super 'Dr. Know-All Pierce-All' had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screw boxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames."
For "Dr. Know-All Pierce-All" read, well, you know who.
Cross, Amanda: In the Last Analysis (Kate Fansler)
Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, a professor at Columbia University—the first woman to obtain tenure in the English department there—who specialized in modern British literature. She tried to keep her mystery-writing alter-ego a secret, but a fan ferreted out the truth, and one can see why that fan was suspicious. All of the many entries in this series are set in academia, and the detective is a professor in the English department of a university not unlike Columbia. I should know by now that I don't do well with insufficiently hard-boiled mysteries, but the literature jokes and references made this one a bit less of a slog than it might have been for this one-time English major and incessant reader. Maybe I'll read another one someday?
Babel, Isaac: Collected Stories (Penguin Classics)
I'm not the first to note the similarity between Isaac Babel's stories and the paintings of Marc Chagall. In that both rose out of the Russian Pale of Settlement, the similarity is unsurprising. As much pleasure as we take from Chagall's work, though, for all its similarity with Babel's fiction, we can't help but note that the violence among which Babel's stand-in, "with spectacles on [his] nose and autumn in [his] heart," moves in the stories gives his fiction a harder edge, a conflict—Babel, the consummate Jewish intellectual, rode with Cossacks during the Russian Civil War—that seems absent from the nostalgia of Chagall's canvases. For that reason, the stories seem to evoke a level of existence that Chagall's work neglects. In the laconic detachment, too, Babel's creations seem quite different from those of the Russians we have known. Those of us fortunate enough to discover the Russians in our youth will always return to them and always be rewarded.
Celestin, Ray: Dead Man's Blues: A Novel
Dead Man's Blues is as good, or maybe better, than the first in the series. Author Ray Celestin continues to trace the black diaspora North from New Orleans to Chicago, and uses history effectively (rather than drowning us in fustian).
Louis Armstrong, who was, history attests, on good terms with Al Capone, reappears, and the mobster, too, takes a turn. I'm eager to move on with Celestin and his characters, to a new city, New York City, and a decade further on to the place and time where the next novel is set.
Ames, Jonathan: The Wheel of Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 2)
Happy Doll, having lost his private eye license after his shenanigans in the previous book is now a "security consultant." His new calling takes him to the Pacific Northwest, but there are still lots of good LA moments, including a bit in Marina del Rey where my parents lived for a while. One understands, somewhat in advance of detective Happy Doll, who the villains are in this book, but that doesn't matter. The fun is watching him find out, and then react. I wonder when book 3 will be out.
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