The American Night

Often, when I am writing a novel, I avoid reading fiction. Usually I’m doing a lot of research, much of it almost tangential, but pleasurable nevertheless, and also useful. You just never know what you’re going to find in the junk shop of research. But I do usually find time for some fiction. I have a rule that I only want to read great books. Some great books don’t turn out to be so great. I read Death in Venice and was disappointed. I love Mann. Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain are two of my favorite novels. And these books are examples of two kinds of relationships I have to books. The Magic Mountain was an amazing book. Difficult, pleasurable, intellectually enthralling. I can’t say that I LOVE The Magic Mountain however in quite the same way I can say I love Buddenbrooks. If you were to ask me to judge I would say of course that The Magic Mountain is the far greater novel. But which one did I love? Who would I sneak off with for a fling any time? Why, Buddenbrooks! Mann wrote it in his twenties. It is a family saga. There is an audacity at work here. It is really ballsy to write a book with the sprawl over generations that Buddenbrooks has at any age, much less your early twenties.

I frankly can’t remember all of the novels I read this year. The big hits were The Quiet American and The Age of Innocence. The latter needs no introduction by me, certainly, and the former I’ve written about. I did read volume one of Miklos Banffy’s Transylvania Trilogy, They Were Counted, a huge family saga set in the Austro-Hungarian twilight. It tells tales of two cousins, their failed love affairs, of lonely aristocratic women married to sadistic men, of men and women who love horses and the countryside, and of Transylvania and the jostle of people thrown together by invasion, migration and history, of Romanians, Magyars and Austrians. I can’t say it was great at all, just absorbing, interesting, a monument to the pleasures of telling and showing. I will say I’ve always been bored by the American obsession with Show Don’t Tell! I like to be told what people are thinking and feeling, almost as much as I love watching a compulsive gambler plunk down money he has shamefully borrowed for one last drunken throw of the dice. One day I’ll read volumes 2 and 3.

At some point in the spring I finished the first draft of GAHA: BABES OF THE ABYSS and at the suggestion of Cara Hoffman, decided to read some Noir fiction. She recommended  Unquenchable Fire, by Rachel Pollack, The Little Sleep, by Paul Tremblay, and Generation Loss, by Elizabeth Hand. Then, through friends and the ever lovely Google, I found a few other books: China Mieville’s The City and the City, D.B. Grady’s Red Planet Noir, Chris Holm’s Dead Harvest and J.K. Jeter’s Noir, and Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time. I’m going to separate these out and blurb them quickly.

Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire is a sci fi alternate world story set in a magical future and tells the story of a reluctant rebel, Jennifer Mazdan. Pollack is immersed in mystical literature, or at least she channels it, and publishes mostly about Tarot readings now. The book was exciting and fun and the world she creates, of collective fantasy and mass religious spectacle, in New York and environs, is both real and oddball. Not really hardboiled or noir, it does capture the feel and smell of New York City while also using the language and symbolism of dream and mystical revelation. It reminded me of Robert Graves’ Watch the North Wind Rise. 

The Little Sleep on the other hand is set in contemporary Boston and is a mash up of Raymond Chandler and, in what must be extremely gratifying to His Holiness Jonathan Lethem, Motherless in Brooklyn, where the Chandleresque prose is in the service of a protagonist with Tourette’s Syndrome. I have not read Lethem’s book, but the idea is ingenious on so many levels I can see how it is becoming a genre in its own right. Tremblay’s detective, Mark Genevich, has narcolepsy, which pretty much limits his cases to what can be done from home on the computer. He’s a mess, a chain smoker and a heavy drinker who falls asleep without warning, and worse, enters into a fugue state where he hallucinates events. His case takes him out of the house and onto the highway where he engages in a few harrowing drives, in pursuit of murder and phantoms from his past. The prose races along and the homage to Chandler is loving.

Another homage to the master is set on Mars. Red Planet Noir, by D.B.Grady, is a hard-boiled detective story. Mike Sheppard is a heart broken alcoholic New Orleans detective who is called to Mars to solve the murder of a rich man by his trophy wife. The trophy wife is a bombshell blond. Sheppard, the narrator, finds himself in the coils of conspiracy. He is frequently sapped and knocked unconscious. The style is remarkably good for a flat out imitation of Chandler. Mars itself is rendered in lurid colour. He doesn’t get into a lot of technical detail, sticking to the vertiginous sensation of space flight. This is good. I don’t like a lot of technical science fiction mumbo jumbo. This books is fun to read, intelligently written but in no way original. He works the standard action of a Chandler book in a different place and channels mostly Chandler’s sarcasm. He attempts to weave in Chandler’s disappointment and ennui but only achieves a tone of self-pity in a series of stock reminiscences about his unfaithful ex-wife.

Dead Harvest, by Chris Holm, is a supernatural noir about a soul stealing demon who refuses to steal the soul of an innocent woman. None of the demon hierarchy believes in her innocence and his act threatens to set off an apocalyptic war between heaven and hell, which have existed for eons in a delicate cold war balance. This was also good natured and hardboiled, with the standard counter-point between misspent past, a wronged woman and an attempt to do good. It reminded me of the Showtime series Dead Again.

One book I didn’t finish, that annoyed me, that was, well, awful, was K. W. Jeter’s Noir. It tried too hard. It made no sense. I didn’t care.

Noir and Hard Boiled are coiled together but separable. Hard Boiled is a prose style. Noir is a way of looking at the world. The above books use both the poetic, hardboiled style, and the shadow mentality of the noir anti-hero, in different ways and settings: fantasy, sci fi, contemporary detective fiction, supernatural sci fi. They collide genres and styles and create interesting entertainments. But the next three books do more than that, while invoking, mastering in their own voice, actually, noir and hardboiled fiction.

China Mieville’s The City and The City won me over slowly. It is an austere novel with an intense conceptual and visual focus that takes it into the realms of high art, while scrupulously maintaining the rules of a police procedural. The book takes place in an imaginary Central European city that is divided, not in half, but into two distinct, overlapping territories, Besz and Ul Qoma. It is divided in the minds of the inhabitants. I have tried often to describe this city, but that is what the book does so brilliantly. A murder is committed in one of the cities, and the body is taken, legally, into the other. It is, without permission, illegal for citizens of one city to see, or stray into the other. It breaks a law called Breach. Breach carries dire consequences.  Tyador Borlu, a cynical homicide cop must investigate the murder. We know nothing of this man other than that he loves two women, and cares about the job. He is cool, mostly silent, making his way through the gray, old European city. The mystery is compelling, yes, but the prose and the place are the stars of this book. It is as if each word were engraved with a steel pen in a zinc plate and washed in  acid. Mieville describes the way the two cities, and their inhabitants are intermeshed as crosshatching. It is his special genious to have rendered a compelling mystery through the conceit of crosshatching.  

Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss is also a mash up of worlds, but not of words. Her protagonist, Cass Neary, is an East Village 70’s holdout, still snorting speed, stealing stuff and sneering at everyone she meets. As a young person she published two books of photography, but she’s done nothing since. A friend gets her an interview with her hero, a woman photographer who has not published in 40 years and lives on a remote island off the coast of Maine. Cass loads up on drugs and drives to Maine where, hilariously, she clashes with the locals, and finds herself at her old, decrepit and drunken hero’s home, which she shares sometimes with her son. There is a mystery here too. Hand’s prose is gorgeous. She writes like a photographer in deep colors and captures too the savage, contrary voice of her protagonist. She seems equally at home in the abandoned buildings of a failed artist colony on an island in the ocean as among the abandoned buildings (if there are any anymore!) of the Lower East Side. She also mentions some great bands, not least of which is Television. Her prose is like Tom Verlain’s guitar. Her eyes are like telescopes!

Finally there is The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock’s first novel, an unsettling, occasionally hilarious ride through the swath of American bibles and rust that runs from West Virginia through southern Ohio. Here people cling to their guns and their religion and use both to torture and murder each other. It begins when Willard Russell returns from the Pacific War in 1945 and meets a beautiful waitress in Knockemstiff, Ohio, a desperately benighted holler. He marries the waitress they have a son, Arvin. Willard doesn’t teach Arvin much, but when two drunks insult his wife he beats them nearly to death, and tells Arvin never to take any shit from anyone. It’s a lesson he remembers. What spirals out from here is better left for a single review. Pollock’s voice is just so dead-on, funny, serious, sensuous. You can smell the mold and dead mice, taste the whiskey. And the scenes of blood sacrifice invoke both Hammer Studios and dreams that drench the pillow with sweat.

I race through these books because I didn’t get around to reviewing them before. But what they have in common is the hardboiled style, invented by Chandler and Hemmingway and London, the American prose poetry of violence and extremity, and Noir, the mind of a marginal anti-hero, failing in the American night.