The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran

Published by Atria Books on September 18, 2018

The title of this novel is not Claire DeWitt and the Case of the Infinite Blacktop, but it is a Claire DeWitt novel, notwithstanding the departure from the tradition Sara Gran established when she titled the first two Clare DeWitt novels. Claire DeWitt novels are noir with some bright splashes of paint that occasionally relieve the darkness, but there is still plenty of bleakness for noir fans. The title, for example: “Experience was just a long, infinite, blacktop of things you’d regret not enjoying later.” Or: “There is no escape from the pain of other people. They would ruin you and you would ruin them.” That’s dark.

The novel begins with Claire on the ground and bleeding, the victim of an attempted murder by car. Everyone in LA, Claire is told, suffers a death by car. Now she only needs to figure out who tried to kill her and why. She also needs to survive the killer’s next attempt.

The story alternates the past with the present. The past is 1999, when Claire was investigating the unsolved mystery of an artist’s death. Yes, he died in a car accident — but was it an accident? The 1999 story takes Claire into the art world, where the road to success requires artists to become commercial, while the road to respect (from other serious artists, at least) dooms an artist to poverty. The immensely talented dead artist, Merritt, was the friend of a less talented but successful artist, Ann, who is also dead (yes, she died in a car accident — but). Claire noses around LA artists (an interesting if sometimes appalling group) and digs up facts about the fates of both artists, all in an effort to log enough hours to earn her California PI license.

The present is 2011. Claire is trying to figure out who tried to run her down with a car. The answer, of course, ties into the 1999 mystery. It also ties into a “girl detective” magazine that, like an obscure book about crime investigation by a French detective, influenced her life.

Good fiction is often a self-help book with a plot. Claire is going through some difficult emotional times in 1999 and another character gives her some comforting words about accepting the inevitability of change and pain — comforting not because the thoughts are particularly original, but because they are expressed in an original way. But advice is one thing and internalizing it is another, so Claire is still a bit of a mess. That’s what makes her real.

Speaking of plots — The Infinite Blacktop tells a strange story, but its strangeness is part of its appeal. Some of the story is told indirectly in the final unpublished girl detective story, a story that encourages the girl detective to solve the biggest mystery of all: Who am I?

During most of The Infinite Blacktop I was wondering “Where is this going?” but by the end, I didn’t care. Plausibility isn’t a factor in a story like this; it’s enough that the plot hangs together and gives the characters a platform for exorcising their demons, or at least a chance to learn that they are made of more than the demons who have been driving their lives. This is a serious story about being afraid to die and afraid to live, even if some plot elements can’t quite be taken seriously, but it is also an entertaining story. Of the always-odd Sara Gran novels I’ve read, The Infinite Blacktop is my favorite.

RECOMMENDED

Colorblind by Reed Farrel Coleman

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on September 11, 2018

The Robert B. Parker factory produced Colorblind (excuse me, Robert B. Parker’s Colorblind). The seventeenth Jesse Stone novel was assembled by Reed Farrel Coleman, who took over the factory job from Michael Brandman. Parker managed to write nine Jesse Stone books before he died and the factory took over. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with factory novels (I like the Spenser novels that Ace Atkins writes), but wouldn’t it be nice to see Coleman’s name in a font that is as large as Parker’s?

The victim of the first murder in Paradise after Stone became Chief of Police was a woman. The word “slut” was written on her body. Now, in a town near Paradise, another murder has followed that pattern, except that the victim is black. Early chapters that focus on a white supremacist neo-Nazi create the impression that the latest murder, at least, is racially motivated.

An outbreak of attacks on interracial couples also has Stone worried about trouble in Paradise, as well as flyers from the “Saviors of Society” that bash liberals, gays, nonwhites, feminists, atheists, and people who want to regulate guns. A character called the Colonel, the leader of the Saviors, tries to make America great again by causing trouble for Stone and his African-American officer, Alisha Davis, who is accused of shooting an unarmed suspect. The resolution of the Davis plot line is beyond implausible.

I appreciate the sentiment underlying the novel’s depiction of right-wing lunatics, but Coleman is so heavy-handed in that portrayal that it didn’t quite ring true. As villains go, the Colonel is completely over the top.

Jesse’s battle with alcoholism and his reliance on AA to resist using alcohol as a stress reliever is a fairly common device to add interest to characters in cop novels. Unfortunately, Jesse’s rather ordinary demons are not enough to make him compelling. Jesse was edgy in his original conception; now he's just dull. The frequent references to his ability to stay strong and avoid the bottle come across as a substitute for deeper character development, as is the portrayal of Jesse as a stalwart, incorruptible, by-the-book cop (unless he’s beating someone up because he decides they deserve it).

There’s a difference between being admirable and interesting, and Jesse is too boring to be interesting. The attempt to humanize him by changing his personal life at the novel’s end feels forced. The supporting characters are more like shadows than people; Coleman makes no serious effort to give them depth.

The story moves quickly, thanks to Coleman’s dialog-heavy writing style. The plot lacks surprises and the heroic ending is a bit silly. I have no strong feelings, positive or negative, about Colorblind. I’m recommending it primarily to fans of the series, but there are so many thrillers that are better than this one, I can’t recommend it to readers who are looking for something special, or even something that’s above average.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

John Woman by Walter Mosley

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 4, 2018

In John Woman, Walter Mosley again proves why his inclusion in my list of three favorite modern crime writers is not just laminated, but anchored in cement. John Woman is a crime novel in the way that Native Son and Crime and Punishment are crime novels. The books combines a crime plot with philosophy, psychology, and Tolstoy’s view that historical truth is elusive if not impossible to discover. It is fresh and original and a masterpiece in concept and execution.

Cornelius “CC” Jones lived with his father, Herman Jones, but he learned about life from his mother’s stories about the gangsters she dated. Herman reveres the English language, suggesting he might be modeled after Mosley, whose love of language is revealed in the lovely language he uses to tell his tales. But Herman is losing his words and finds himself living in the past, robbed of the present by the creeping onset of dementia.

Herman is hospitalized when the novel begins and bedridden for the next several years. CC secretly takes over Herman’s job as a projectionist so that the paychecks will keep coming. In 1955, when CC is 16, he commits a murder and is later seduced by a female cop who (unaware of the murder) enjoys dominating him. His mother has disappeared, apparently having accompanied a mobster who fled from the law.

When the novel shifts ahead to 1974, CC had adopted the identity of John Woman to protect himself from arrest for a murder he knows will eventually be discovered. He is a professor of history at a university founded and operated by members of a new age religion, a subgroup of which is known as the Platinum Path. He teaches his students that historical truth is a mirage shaped by the political, religious, and cultural biases of historians — a view that other faculty members view as undermining history and historians.

John Woman is rooted in a murder, but it is primarily a story of decent people who treat each other decently, people who value life and who understand the importance of generosity, forgiveness, and acceptance. Their decency transcends race or religion. History is full of heroes who spend time shaping a legacy, but life is full of heroes who will never be studied by historians — the friends who sacrifice to help us get through tough times, the strangers who make an effort to be kind to another stranger, the ordinary folk who make a difference in unseen ways that nevertheless change the world.

John Woman reminds us that what we don’t know about the people society regards as historically important vastly exceeds what we do know. We know even less about all the equally important people who shaped but have been lost to history. Making that point in a lecture to the faculty nearly costs Woman his job. His freedom (and thus his life) is at risk because his history as a murderer might be discovered — but it is a history he shares with many murderers, and yet another example of undiscovered historical knowledge.

The novel’s multiple themes include: bringing courage and dignity to death, the importance of understanding history to understanding life, casting off the chains of childhood to become an adult, rejection of false certainties in favor of intellectual inquiry, the nature of fate and destiny (“our purposes are not necessarily our intentions”), the need to shape the future rather than obsessing about the unchangeable past, the possibility of rising above the limited role that society might assign to people of a particular race or origin, the empowering recognition that oppressors are victims of their own oppression, the myth of white identity, the notion that denying someone else’s past (pretending, for example, that people of an oppressed group were never oppressed) is a form of murder, the drive people feel to judge each other and how little right they have to do it. And this: “There’s no value in persecuting someone for overcoming their history in an attempt to forge a better future.”

John Woman is a surprising character — he never does the expected, and is capable of both great empathy and cold calculation, able at any moment to make either the most or the least moral choice. He likens himself to the coyote of mythology, the cunning trickster. The plot of John Woman is also surprising. For all the novel’s surprises, however, it always maintains credibility; none of the plot twists are forced.. The intersection of John’s life with the Platinum Path adds suspense, as does the question of whether John will go to prison (and perhaps be transformed into predator or prey) for the crime he committed almost two decades earlier. Still, this is a novel of ideas (“the most dangerous products of humankind”) rather than thrills, of complex moral choices rather than fights and shootouts. It might be Mosley’s best work.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on September 11, 2018

The Forbidden Door is the fourth Jane Hawk novel. Each book is a long installment in a very long story, so there’s not much point in reading The Forbidden Door unless you’ve read the first three novels in the series. Despite Dean Koontz’ undeniable talent, I’m not sure it is worth the effort to read an unimaginative mind-control conspiracy story that could have been told in one or two books, or at most a trilogy, but that Koontz expanded to fill five books.

Jane Hawk was an FBI agent until her husband killed himself. Since he wasn’t the kind of guy to end it all, Jane did some research and discovered that suicides were spiking. She is apparently the only person in the world who managed to connect that statistic to a vast conspiracy involving nanotechnology that takes control of the human mind and renders people submissive to the orders of their masters.

The masters are the usual gang of high powered business leaders and politicians who want to shape the world by killing everyone who might make it better (people who, from their perspective, would be making it worse). The grand guru of the scheme devised a computer model to select the victims.

Jane is chasing these guys while hiding her son from them, since they are also chasing her. I’ve long wondered why the bad guys didn’t try harder to find the kid, and in this fourth novel they finally listened to me. The plot of The Forbidden Room involves the conspirators narrowing the search for Jane’s son, who eventually stays with a genius named Cornell Jasperson who is coping with autism, agoraphobia, and a host of other mental disorders and fears, all of which Jane’s son and his two dogs seem on the verge of miraculously curing. Like all of the “good guy” characters in this series, Cornell is a paradigm of niceness.

Two very nice characters who played important supporting roles in earlier novels, a black sheriff named Luther Tillman and an elderly widower named Bernie Riggowitz, return to play similar roles in Jane’s quest to save her son from the clutches of the conspirators. The plot consists of Jane figuring out how to reach her son and get him to safety (again), alternating with scenes of her son and his dogs bonding with Cornell and scenes of the bad guys doing their mind control thing (which turns out to have a flaw, suggested by the novel’s title, that creates a new kind of danger).

Like other novels in the series, this one feels padded. In fact, the entire novel seems like filler. Koontz always does a masterful job of creating likable characters, but in this series characters tend to be created and discarded in a series of mini-stories that are consistent with the larger plot but that could just as easily have been omitted. I suppose that’s an inevitable product of turning a one-novel idea into multiple novels.

Nor does Koontz imbue his characters with the kind of complexity that characterizes his best work. Hawk is such a capable, caring, selfless individual, seemingly lacking even the slightest imperfection, that she also lacks any dimension of depth. Cornell and Bernie are at least quirky, but they come across as stereotypes (Cornell reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man and Bernie reminded me of a less crusty version of the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine). Sadly enough, the novel’s most interesting character is a bad guy who believes he has been cast in a play and is being directed on an illusory stage by an Unknown Playwright.

Koontz at his best is such a good writer that it is disappointing when he isn’t at his best. The entire series seems to have been written on auto-pilot, and The Forbidden Door does so little to advance the plot that it stands as the weakest of the four books. Book five is scheduled for 2019. I hope that Koontz can find his groove after cashing in on this unoriginal premise. I recommended the first three books because they are mindlessly enjoyable, but at this point I would hesitate to recommend the series as a whole, and I view The Forbidden Door as a novel that is only worth reading for the sake of finishing the series.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Early Work by Andrew Martin

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 10, 2018

Early Work is a well-written domestic comedy-drama. It isn't sufficiently funny to work as a comedy and the characters avoid the deep relationships that give drama to domestic life. To the extent that there’s a plot, it centers on the characters’ ever-changing and frequently overlapping sex lives, and on the ability people have to screw up their lives by chasing something they might not really want. The book has occasional moments of amusement or interest, but the story drifts along until it drifts away.

Early Work feels like an early work — the work of a writer who isn’t quite sure what he wants to say, or perhaps one who has strong writing skills but doesn't know what to do with them. There is more skill than substance on display here. The novel showcases a group of young people who are trying to figure out what the future might hold, but the story fizzles out without offering any greater insight than the possibility of starting something new in the morning.

Early Work is initially narrated by Peter Cunningham, an aspiring writer who dropped out of a PhD program at Yale to live with his girlfriend Julia, a poet who is attending medical school in Virginia so that she can earn a living. Peter has published a couple of stories but seems incapable of finishing a novel, so he is earning a living as a composition instructor at a community college, a gig that gets him a weekly teaching session at a women’s prison. At a party given by their mutual friend Anna, Peter connects with a woman named Leslie, also an aspiring writer, and perhaps the connection is stronger than it should be, given his relationship with Julia. Kate the bartender, who also writes and teaches writing, knows everyone.

Point of view shifts as the story continues, sometimes telling us the backstory of a character from a third person perspective, sometimes returning to the present and Peter’s reflections on his woeful life. The reader moves back to a time when Kate began an affair with Leslie despite Leslie’s occasional desire to be comforted by sex with men. We read about a dinner that brings together Peter, Julia, Leslie, and Leslie’s fiancé Brian, and we learn how Leslie and Brian met. Julia and Peter dissect their relationship while taking a vacation with their old friend Colin. Relationship landmarks happen in Peter’s life, but mostly he complains about his inability to write anything despite his self-identification as a writer.

The aspiring writers have witty and sophisticated conversations about literature and sex, making Early Work a literary version of Sex and the City but with fewer laughs and less interesting characters. Maybe real people actually have effortlessly witty conversations like the characters in Early Work, but conversations like these always come across to me as scripted, and that’s one of the novel’s flaws. Characters converse in a determined effort to prove how interesting they are. I think they sleep together for the same reason. Self-involved characters accuse other characters of being self-involved. Even when they catalog their long lists of failings, they are more self-pitying than insightful. They display wit in abundance but I’m not sure they have much heart. Maybe that’s the point, but reading about heartless characters gets old pretty quickly.

The characters are obnoxiously trendy in their discussions of books and music and food, but I’m not sure if Andrew Martin meant to lampoon trendiness or to showcase it as a desirable characteristic of witty people — particularly witty people who fancy themselves writers, as do most of the characters except for “local foods” guru Brian. Early Work is a short book but, despite its stylistic appeal, I struggled to get through it, primarily because I didn’t think any of its characters are worth knowing.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS