Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Book, Movie & Podcast Reviews my own book page

What was it Faulkner said (wrote?). (Off to Google. Back in minute.) "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." The more Dave Robicheux (Louisiana detective) novels I read, the more I think James Lee Burke may have devoted part of those books to proving Faulkner's statement. Always the lingering effects of slavery dictate racial relations. Members of the southern aristocracy still live in white-columned mansions and control the politics and big business of the area. From the more recent past, a recurring character is always a troubled woman whom Dave bedded at least once. Distant events of dysfunctional families trouble adults who were part of them. And memories of Vietnam haunt those who fought there.

Last Car to Elysian Fields is no exception. Dave returns to New Orleans to investigate the beating of a Catholic priest. Doing so, he encounters the usual array of hired killers, crooked politicians, greedy businessmen, prostitutes and other bottom-feeders. Put it all together and what do you get? A really good page-turner. Burke's getting better with each book.

Found one oddity in Last Car. The book begins; Atatair, Dave's adopted daughter, is away at college, and Bootsie, his wife, is dead. That starts me wondering: did I mess up the order when I lined the books up to be read chronologically, or did Burke choose not to write the book that would cover those events? I'm right curious to find out.

Last Car high points:

1) "New Orleans wasn't a city. It was an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge." (page 118) Now I've never spent time in New Orleans, but judging from Burke's characters and his scenes in wet weather, it's an apt description.

2) "… as though he were purging himself of any intimations of his own mortality." (page 114) I love slipped-in literary references. Why, I wonder? Because they show the author reads and remembers, or because I feel smart when I recognize them?

3) Dave is questioning an elderly black man about a jazz singer who died—probably was murdered—in jail. The answer: "Ain't nothing left of him but a voice on some scratchy old records. Nobody cared what happened back then. Nobody care now. You axed for the troot'. I just give it to you." (page 116) Burke on race. How true, IMHO, of course.

4) "Ordinary people sometimes do bad things. A wrong-headed business decision, a romantic encounter in a late-night bar, a rivalry with a neighbor over the placement of a fence, any of these seemingly insignificant moments can initiate a series of events that, like a rusty nail in a foot, can systemically poison a normal law-abiding person's life and propel him into a world he thought only existed in the perverse imaginings of pulp novelists." (page 117) Damn straight. If not, what would Burke write about? And my own writing? Obviously, I need more perversions in my imaginings.

5) "There were great differences in the room, but not between the races. The black and white working men spoke the same regional dialect and shared the same political attitudes, all of which had been taught them by others. They denigrated liberals, unions, and the media, considered the local Wal-Mart store a blessing …. They were frightened by the larger world and found comfort in the rhetoric of politicians who assured them the problem was the world's, not theirs." (page 230) Ah, how today it all is.

6) "… portions of Pecan Island, preserved largely by an oil corporation as a recreation area for its CEOs, …" (page 273) Gee, I hear tell there was once a time when everyone, even poor people and grunt workers, could enjoy places of natural beauty.

7) About people pictured on wanted posters: "Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white photographs often taken in late-night booking rooms—unshaved, pig snouted, rodent eyed, harelipped, reassuring us that human evil is always recognizable and that consequently we will never be its victim." (page 364) How much we want to believe that, and how much more we don't want people messing with it. I say that remembering a critic who claimed the movie Shrek was bad—and wrong—because the good characters have to be the physically beautiful ones.

8) Burke does a lot with pleasant exteriors that are only facades. "… a tree-lined side street that looked like an illustration clipped from a 1940 issue of The Saturday Evening Post." (page 421) Burke no longer has to explain that it's a "how town," peopled with everyones who get hurt by shallow and even bad people. The reader simply knows.

9) "Legal definitions had little to do with morality. It was legal to systematically poison the earth and sell arms to lunatics in Third World countries. Politicians who themselves avoided active service and never listened to the sounds of a flame thrower extracted from its victims, or zipped body bags on the faces of their best friends, clamored for war and stood proudly in front of the flag while they sent others off to fight it." (page 430) Written in 2003. More and more I like what Burke has to say.

All of which means I anticipate with pleasure the remaining three fish.

Martha, as far as Bootsie...all I can tell you is to keep reading. You did not mess up the order. However, I don't recall instances of your statement "From the more recent past, a recurring character is always a troubled woman whom Dave bedded at least once." Not saying it isn't true...I just don't recall it.

You still have several to go: Crusader's Cross, Pegasus Descending, The Tin Roof Blowdown, and the latest, Swan Peak. Another is due out next year, I believe. And as far as I'm concerned they get better and better.

I'm really glad you are enjoying the Dave Robicheaux books. We have been reading them since the beginning -- he is like a member of our family. Two years ago, my son and I searched out some of the places frequently mentioned in the books around New Iberia. It was a lot of fun. We think he is one of the best -- if not the best -- contemporary writers working today.

BTW, there is a forum at jamesleeburke.com. Burke himself pops in quite frequently to answer questions and chat.

EmmaG

I could easily be overstating the case but the last one I read had the ex who tries to rape him at a convention and this one the woman who may or may not have been molested by her father. Two in a row sent up a flag, but those could be the only two.

Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work is a collection of short stories by a Jason Brown. Some were good; others weren't. I did encounter some interesting comparisons and sentences.

1) A narrator is talking about an "officious presence" that all members of his family share and that he has "only otherwise noticed in school crossing guards and the managers of fast food restaurants." (page 51) I might have added mall parking lot guards, but that's based on a personal incident involving my van, a huge and empty lot, and its guard who needed to flex his power. Falls in the why-are-academic-politics-so-bitter category.

2) Another narrator describes a lake seen from far above as being "like a glass eye peering up out of the earth." (page 96) Cool.

3) Cool simile number two: on his "mother whose voice plucked at my nerves like the yowl of a cat in heat." (page 139) I'm pretty sure it was "plucked" and "in heat" that won me over.

4) A less-than-peripheral character was in "the Augusta Mental Health Institute, a place so infamous for what my mother called its 'dirt basement ways' that perfectly sane people visiting their unfortunate relatives were known to have fallen apart behind its walls and never come out." (page 140) A friend and I had a similar experience in the Ansonia Hotel in NYC, but we didn't fall apart. Instead, for two hours got very lost and very, very giggly.
5) "When the doctor arrived, his greeting was hollow, echoing across the distance between his and his attention." (page 229) I'm mulling whether an interesting sentence that totally pulls a reader out of the story is a good or bad thing. Maybe Jason Brown should write only sentences and give up the idea of a story.

So will the above writing samples make me recommend the book? Nope. IMHO you've seen the best moments.

Last weekend I listened to The Graveyard Book, written and read by Neil Gaiman.

It's one of the few books I've read where I wholly enjoyed having it read to me, but also kept thinking "In the near future I want to buy this book and read it on my own." Gaiman's voices for the different characters are wonderful.

I know it was mentioned here waay back, but I couldn't find it with search. If you haven't got around to reading it yet, it's well worth it (and it's out in paperback now.)

The basic storyline is that a crawling infant lost his family and wandered into a graveyard, where he was raised by ghosts and other unnatural creatures. Hard for me to describe in any inviting way but the the book won a Newbery and that's always a good sign.

I read and reviewed another one by Gaiman. Can't remember which. I've heard about this one--I think an elderly lady at the saturday peace corner recommended it but didn't mention the author. She had also forgotten the title. So thanks. I'll put it on the list to buy when I get my $250 stimulus check from the government.

This is a drive-by; I'm halfway through Everything Hurts by Bill Scheft, and wanted to share this before I lost it. He's referring to people who have big, beautiful, impressive libraries of books they haven't read,

On page 10 I was ready to stop reading Scott Sigler's Infected, but my every-book-deserves-50-pages rule kept me going. Around page 45 it grabbed me. By page 339, when it finally ended, I found myself reconsidering my 50-page rule. But I think this book cheated. How, one may ask, does a book cheat? By making the end merely a lead into the next book in the series.

Infected, sort of a combined Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien, is primarily the story of one man who surgically removes creatures growing in his body. (From those words imagine the possibilities for gore. Then double it. Three or more times. You're now approaching the level of gore in Infected.) Of course, while the self-mutilation is going on, all sorts of interesting questions are being asked. Who are these parasites? Where are they from? What do they want? Perhaps those questions will be answered in Contagious. Or maybe not. I'm not about to struggle through another three-hundred-plus pages to find out.

And I won't go and see the movie, assuming there will be one. The special affects folks are going to have way too good a time with spurting blood, severed limbs and purple pus.

I've never liked Norman Mailer. Granted, until this past week I'd never read anything he'd written, but I didn't like the press on him. In either the 1970s or '80s he was instrumental in the early release of a murderer who in a matter of a few weeks murdered someone else. In the 1960s he was arrested for stabbing his current wife, his third, I think. I sensed he believed that talented people, particularly writers, could/should be above the law. I've now read The Executioner's Song and my opinion hasn’t changed.

Oh, the research demonstrated by that book is mind-boggling, and I will grant Mailer's readability. I have to do the latter; after all, I've just finished a 1054-page book, and I didn't start muttering "Oh, just go ahead and kill him" until around page 936.

And for either good or bad reasons I did dog-ear pages.

1) Nicole, the love of Gary Gilmore's life, connects with him because she thinks she understands prison. "Prison was being married too young and having kids." (page 91) I think I agree. There are some prisons I'm happy to have avoided.

2) "If the psychopath were ever accepted as legally insane, then crime, judgment and punishment would be replaced by antisocial acts, therapy and convalescence." (page 385) Probably true. Scary. And it might be happening. (Got an opinion, Phil?)

3) Came across some interesting comments on Utah. Regarding its Supreme Court: "Those justices were probably all Mormon, and just about the closest thing you could find on the Bench to a theocracy." (page 532) Anyone know anything about Utah? I know it's a "red" state, but could it politically be considered a theocracy? Here? Right in the US? A country that stands for democracy? Inquiring minds etc.

4) Of course the validity of the death penalty runs throughout the book. Personally, I don’t know how I feel about it; it's one of those mammoth issues I don't let myself think about. I do, however, think much of the culture surrounding it is ridiculous. Twice Gilmore attempts suicide. Once he's left in a coma. A reporter says, "He has to be conscious. They can't execute a man who is comatose." (page 609) Come off it. The state wants to be nice, at a minimum considerate, about when it kills someone? If I'm really supposed to believe that, then I am against capital punishment. Kill someone; don’t kill someone. But don't think you're "playing nice" only if the person to be killed is aware of what's going on.

5) I have no problem with the f-word. Gilmore uses it continually in his letters and in dialogue. It fits. But when Mailer writes "if was like every f'ing lawyer in Salt Lake City …" (page 670), it was like chalk on a blackboard. Gee, maybe I am a prude.

6) Finally, there's a wonderful example why lawyers write the way they do and why writers of government regulations take a cue from the lawyers and use the same language. At the time of the execution one of the lawyers notices a helicopter hovering over the prison. He knows the fly space has been restricted and checks into it. The regulation stated planes weren't allowed; thus, a helicopter was okay. (page 978) Using the title of Countdown's new final segment: what the f…?

So, do I recommend? Sure. Mailer was one of the journalists in the 1960s who moved nonfiction in a new direction. Of course, IMHO, Thomas Wolfe did it better. And with a lot less words.

Has anyone read Pearl in the Storm by Tori Murden McClure, the first woman to row across the Atlantic? It sounds fascinating but my list is getting a little long, so I'm trying to hold back.