Four from the office

As I've noted before, I usually try to keep my life as a blogger and my life as the promotions director of the University of Chicago Press separate. This blog is, after all, something I write on my own time about my life as a reader, and while my reading definitely informs the work I do at the office, they're separate worlds, and, by design, the blog reflects that.

But occasionally they overlap--and this is a very good week for that. So, with apologies for seeming to be shilling for my employers, four notes about Chicago books that I've had a hand in and am thus particularly excited about:

1 The fifth Parker novel, The Score, is the free e-book of the month from Chicago for September--and this time, like with the Anthony Powell giveaway back in December, it's free not just from the Press directly, but also from all the major e-book retailers. I've been writing about Richard Stark ever since I first started reading the Parker novels nearly four years ago; being part of bringing these novels back into print has been one of the things I'm most proud of in a twelve-year career in publishing.

The Score is a great place to start reading Parker: it's one of the most exciting books in the series, but it's also got a lightness of tone that's unusual and welcoming--there's none of the gaspingly brutal violence of, say, Plunder Squad here. I'm confident that the thousands of people who download this freebie won't need much convincing to move from that to one of the other nineteen Parkers that Chicago now has available. If you need more convincing, check out my many posts about Stark in the archives, or visit Ethan Iverson's checklist of Donald Westlake's complete oeuvre.

2 George Pelecanos's new novel, The Cut, features a character who teaches literature to public high school students in DC . . . and one of the books on his syllabus is Stark's The Hunter. After reading aloud the opening page, he asks the students what the description of Parker, all hands and shoulders and implicit violence, makes them feel:

"Way his hands are swinging," said another, "it's like he don't care about nothin."

"He doesn't belong in that suit," said William Rogers, aka Moony.

"Exactly," said Leo. "The suit doesn't fit him, both literally and metaphorically. It's a costume to him. He'd be more comfortable walking naked through a jungle. The Parker books are crime novels, but they're also about a man whose physicality stands in contrast to a working world that, at the time, had become increasingly mechanized and deskbound."

"I don't get what you're sayin, Mr. Lucas."

"Parker is a man of action. He's defined by what he does rather than what he says."

Later, in a touch I suspect Westlake would have appreciated, when the teacher asks the class what they liked about the book, a kid pipes up, "It's short."

3 Another book I had a hand in returning to print has just arrived in bookstores, and it couldn't be more different from Stark's work: Francoise Sagan's A Certain Smile. Sagan's second novel (after the explosively successful Bonjour Tristesse), it is, I think, better than her famous debut: its characters are more convincingly imagined, its prose--full of quotably pithy lines--more stripped-down, its world-weariness feeling a tad more earned. In the Economist, Molly Young called it "a popsicle of a book," and that's not far off, if you can imagine a popsicle leavened with a delectable dash or two of bitters. As autumn draws in, what better way to spend some time than sighing over the prematurely cynical love affairs of a beautiful young French student? Lay in a stock of Gauloises and enjoy!

4 And, fnally, what is perhaps the book I'm most excited about this fall, Dmitry Samarov's Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab, should be showing up in bookstores everywhere any day now. I've been a fan for a few years now of Dmitry's blog about the people he meets and the strange things he sees while driving a cab, and I'm pleased to have played a part in transforming that blog into a book. If you're fascinated by urban life, and you've always wondered about that slice of it that only cabbies see, this is the book for you: it's full of wonderful (and some horrible) anecdotes and unforgettable images of people with their guard down, revealing things to this stranger behind the wheel that, you sense, they don't even tell their closest friends. It's an amazing book, and it's powered by Dmitry's deep empathy: up against people at their worst day after day, he somehow keeps from being crushed. Indeed, what makes his stories stand out is that even as he marvels at oddity he never loses sight of the fact that it's human oddity, and thus worthy of our forbearance and care.

Dmitry will be appearing at a number of venues in Chicago this fall, including a launch party on October 1 at the Rainbo where I'll be one of the many readers (and certainly the least famous). And if you're on Twitter, definitely follow him: you'll get plenty of late-night stories of unusual fares.

Publishing's a job, like any other. But once in a while, you simply feel lucky to be a part of it. With these books, that's definitely where I stand.

Peter Pavia

On the plane back from a Thanksgiving visit to the in-laws in San Jose, I read a Hard Case Crime novel, Peter Pavia’s Dutch Uncle (2005), which got me thinking about George Pelecanos. Not that Pavia writes much like Pelecanos; his much more obvious (and clearly credited) forebear is Elmore “Dutch” Leonard. Rather, my thoughts ran in that direction because over the years Pelecanos has garnered tremendous critical praise, his novels able to escape the crime/mystery ghetto and be reviewed more or less as straight-up novels—and Pavia, at least on the evidence of Dutch Uncle, is better.

Now, I’ve only read four of Pelecanos’s novels, the ones featuring private eye Derek Strange, which I understand are not as highly regarded as his earlier quartet featuring Nick Stefano, Dimitri Karras, and Marcus Clay (let alone his reportedly stellar work on The Wire). And I’ve enjoyed all four: together they present an wide-ranging and detailed picture of contemporary Washington, D.C., legal and illegal, and unshadowed by the Capitol or the White House and what happens there. In Strange, Pelecanos has created an interesting central character who grows with each story, and he’s surrounded him with a supporting cast that looks like it’ll prove worth his continued attention. He’s aiming high, trying to both relate a good crime story and tell us something about the way our cities work now, especially at the margins.

Pelecanos clearly works very hard to portray different perspectives, from that of a redneck Virginia gun dealer to the drug peddler who kills with what the rednecks sells him. More than any other contemporary author I can think of, he refuses to be limited by racial boundaries, feeling as entitled to present the perspective of a black teenager as of the Greek restaurateur who is much closer to his own background. It’s admirable. But somewhere along the line, the seams start showing. Reading Pelecanos, at times I can feel the effort, can guess at all that’s involved in trying to portray life from these varied points of view—I can see what ought to be transparent. Part of that comes from Pelecanos’s attempts to put readers deep into the thought processes of secondary characters through a third-person omniscient narration so close as to be essentially first-person—near stream-of-consciousness at times—which tends to by its very nature draw attention to itself. I find that at those points I’m thinking about Pelecanos’s word choices and thought processes rather than sinking willingly into the characters themselves. Those very efforts at authenticity backfire; they remind me that the characters are ultimately under Pelecanos’s thumb, subject to his will and the needs of his story.

None of this is intended to denigrate George Pelecanos: he’s writing good books, and ambitious books, which I’ll keep reading and for which it woulf be unfair to punish him. Instead, it’s an attempt to tell you how good I think Peter Pavia’s Dutch Uncle is. Whereas Pelecanos has, in my view, failed to fully bring his secondary characters to life; Pavia populates his novel with more than a dozen fully realized characters, without striking a wrong note. To make the comparison with Pelecanos fair, I should point out that we only see from the perspective of three characters, all white men, in Dutch Uncle—but the overall impression of a group of real people living their lives and happening to intersect is so strong that the perspective doesn’t seem the slightest bit limited.

The novel tells the story of Harry Healy, a small-time hood who gets in over his head and is suspected of murdering a drug dealer. The plot is pretty skeletal, but like most good crime novels, Dutch Uncle has a strong sense of place, depicting all the squalor of mid-90s Miami, along with other unsavory Florida locales, and it’s got a full cast, including worn-down cops, vapid models, a hillbilly drug dealer, a rust-fund cokehead, bar bouncers, and a variety of good people in bad situations. What separates it from a lot of novels—not just crime novels—is that the characters, even the most minor, seem completely alive and independent: they’re ends in themselves rather than means, who they are rather than what they are—or what Pavia needs them to be and do. Oh, they further the plot (after all, in a crime novel, how could they not?), and they advance Pavia’s themes, but those considerations always take a back seat to the characters’ own existences as fully imagined people.

Pavia has somehow, for one novel at least, found his way to the right side of that near-mystical line that separates the ordinary fictional characters, created out of whole cloth from masses of detail, from those who, like Tolstoy’s characters, surmount their details and seem alive, rounded, and breathing. Lord knows, I’m not saying Pavia’s as good as Tolstoy—he doesn't, for one thing, project quite the same god-like sympathy for everyone that Tolstoy did in his novels—but his characters cohere in the same manner, their histories, thoughts, and actions forming a seemingly organic whole, from the hapless young Alex Fernandez, a washed-up college baseball star now caught up with criminals, to the quietly drunk house painter whose work ethic Healy learns to appreciate.

I’d be a far better critic if I could identify that animating spark, the difference between this detail and that—between Pavia’s gay Miami playboy drug dealer’s too-short silk bathrobe that reveals his sagging balls and Pelecanos’s teenaged drug dealer’s unspoken love of his pit bull—but in the absence of science, I’m forced to go with feel, and Pavia’s characters feel right. And their actions and choices, because somehow Pavia makes them seem to be wholly their own—surprising at times, but always believable—carry a real weight, a sense of long-term consequence that lends a palpable tension to every moment of decision. That in itself is a measure of Pavia’s achievement: there does seem to be a long term that those actions could screw up; these characters have an existence after the book is closed.

From what I can tell, Dutch Uncle is Pavia’s debut novel. It’s the best I’ve read from Hard Case Crime yet, and I can’t wait for his next.