I declare myself completely in love with the Dave Robicheaux novels by James Lee Burke. And I'm not talking about any fly-by-night, love-at-first-sight thing. It's been gradual. I wasn’t crazy about the series at first; I kept comparing it to Ed McBain's 87th precinct novels and Dave Robicheaux's stories came up short. Now I'm more than willing to admit there's room on the literary scene for both of them.
Pegasus Descending takes Burke's usual collection of miscreant characters on their usual journey of debauched mayhem, but more and more I realize that what I like about the Dave Robicheaux series goes beyond plot and character. I'm in love with Burke's view of our world and how he frequently expresses it so beautifully. So here goes:
1) "I think as white people we know deep down inside ourselves the exact nature of the deeds we or our predecessors committed against people of color. I think we know that if our roles were reversed, if we had suffered the same degree of injury that was imposed upon the Negro race, we would not be particularly magnanimous when payback time rolled around. I think we know that in all probability we would cut the throats of the people who had made our lives miserable." (pages 75-76) Yes! Yes! Yes! I don't care whether your forefathers owned slaves or not. Slavery and racism have affected this country much more than many white people are ready to admit.
2) From a young, black character: "Hey, you the man called me a pimp. I sell dope, but I ain't no pimp." (page 111) Until I read that, I never really thought about ranking different types of vice. But doing so makes sense.
3) About that same character: "His mama is at M.D. Anderson in Houston. She's had every type of cancer there is. Monarch ain't tole you that?" (page 119) A beginning acting lesson is that you learn about your character by what he says, what others say about him and what he does. Those three sentences changed my view of Monarch on more than one level.
4) "You cracking wise now?" (page 122) Until these books and
NYPD Blue I was only familiar with the noun wisecrack. I like the concept expressed as a verb.
5) IMHO Burke does not handle foreshadowing well. "But the hand had already been dealt, for both Bello and me and his son as well. None of us, at that moment, could have guessed at the outcome." (page 124) Ultimately Bello winds up destitute, his son dead, and Dave busy trying to find some meaning in all of it. So? Those outcomes are not all that different from what happens to other Burke characters. Since the outcomes are not surprising, the foreshadowing proves disappointing—not a reaction a writer should want from a reader, it seems to me.
6)
"No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.' Know who said that?"
No, but please tell us," Helen said.
Lonnie gave her a look. "That great American socialist P.T. Barnum." (page 130)
Sorry, Mr. Burke. That's wrong. I know 'cause that’s what I used to think. Then Doug Thompson on capitolhillblue.com kept attributing it to H.L. Mencken. I knew he was wrong so I googled it. Guess what! Thompson's right. You and I, Mr. Burke, were wrong.
7)
Was my enmity toward Lonnie Marceaux (a DA) so extreme that I would take up the cause of a dope dealer who had set up and murdered a hapless college kid whose father had already psychologically damaged him beyond repair? Was I one of those who always saw a person of color as a victim of social injustice?
I didn't like to think about the answer. (page 277)
I like people to whom the answer—see 1) above—is never THE ANSWER.
8)
… Tripod (Dave's three-legged raccoon) had always been a loyal and loving pet who never strayed more than fifty yards from his home because it had always been a safe place where he could trust the people who lived there or visited there.
Then in my mind's eye I saw a blond with tiny pits pooled in his cheeks squeezing a tube of roach paste into Tripod's bowl. (page 304)
The above broke my heart. If you ever meet anyone—or anything—that has that kind of trust, you do nothing that might mess with it.
I did once. By accident, of course. I was playing Old Maid with a four-or-five-year-old, and I won. In my defense, how was I supposed to know his parents always let him win? When I was five, no one let me win. (Right, Martha, and we all know how well-adjusted AND SECURE you turned out to be.) Anway, I didn’t know the child-always-wins rule, I won, and the look on the little boy's face told me what I had done. I had collapsed an underpinning of his world. Kids didn't always win 'cause they were cute and little, and—somehow—his parents had misrepresented that world. I tried to tell him the rule was best-two-out-of-three, but he wasn’t buying it. I knew the damage was done, and I've felt guilty ever since.
9) Dave disses Monarch, sums up the conversation and ends with: "Even worse, I had been deliberately cruel, an act that under any circumstances is inexcusable." (page 307) See 8) above. At least my cruelty wasn't deliberate.
10) "But I knew Ragusa (he of the tube of roach paste) belonged to that group of human beings whose pathology is always predictable. By reason of either genetic defect, environmental conditioning or a deliberate decision tojoin themselves at the hip with the forces of darkness, they incorporate into their lives a form of moral insanity that is neither curable nor subject to analysis. They enjoy inflicting pain, and view charity and forgiveness as signals of both weakness and opportunity. The only form of redemption they understand is force. The victim who believes otherwise condemns himself to the death of a thousand deaths." (page 312) Hey! Evil does exist. I thought it might.
11) About a group of young people planning "the takedown of a casino": "They're all amateurs. They get up each day and pretend they're country singers or boxers or Hollywood screenwriters. It's like being in a roomful of schizophrenics." (page 326) Think that's different from being in a room with any other people? We're all just very good at protecting each others' pipedreams. Or rationalizations.
12) A character asks Dave to let go of the past. He can't because "we're the sum total of what we've done and where we've been." (page 325) Are we? Yeah. I guess so.
13) "How do you explain to a man whose daughter has killed herself that there is no 'they,' that the pitiful guilt-driven man who raped her was a victim himself, that the fraternity boys who gangbanged her couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag, that Slim Bruxal (all-around bad guy) had acted with a degree of conscience and tried to return her safely home? How do you deal with the moral authority of ignorance?" (pages 472-3) Empathetic Martha: Oh, those poor misguided people. Schoolmarm Martha: Please, don’t tell me those people vote.
14) The afterward in
Pegasus Descending foreshadows the next Dave Robicheaux book. "… all the events since the death of Yvonne Darbonne (the suicide) seemed to telescope into the distant past. Hurricane Katrina, the nightmare New Orleans had feared for years, struck the city with an intensity that was greater than the destructive force of the nuclear weapons visited upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. … It is no exaggeration to say that the southern rim of Louisiana is gone." (pages 485, 486) Even as I await reading that book with dread (Burke does so love that region of the country), I take solace in my opinion that foreshadowing is not his strong suit.
One fish to go. Sigh.
PS Tripod survives
Pegasus Descending; Regusa doesn’t.
