The Whale Chaser by Tony Ardizzone

First published in 2010; published by Chicago Review Press on May 1, 2015

Vince Sansone lives in Tofino, a fishing village near Vancouver. It is 1974 and Vince has lived in Canada for seven years, having left behind a less than idyllic life in America. Vince's father was a fish monger and Vince, despite his intense need to rebel against his childhood, is gutting fish for a living. Fortunately, his thoughts are frequently diverted by drugs and sex and his career eventually follows a different path.

Like many guys (especially those who alphabetize their jazz albums), Vince has a knack for picking women who leave him. He is befriended by a Native named Ignatius who has a Catholic education like his own, giving Tony Ardizzone a primary vehicle for discussions of philosophy and human nature. Ignatius and other characters are more widely read than Vince, who spends many of his self-pitying moments drinking beer, smoking weed, and feeling stupid.

In alternating sections of the novel we see Vince's childhood in Chicago, where nuns taught him how to bear the suffering inflicted by his father and the world in general. He tells a typical but occasionally engaging story of life in an ethnic (Italian) neighborhood where people maintain closer ties to the old country than to their current home. He spends his time fretting about girls, wondering whether he should become a butcher, and fretting about the butcher's daughter when he's not fretting about a different girl. He also describes sex in tedious detail (it is quite an accomplishment to make me view descriptions of sex as tedious). Much of the Chicago story (and even the Canada story) is "boy meets girls, boy loses girls, boy wallows in self-pity until he meets more girls." It is well written but unoriginal.

Many of the events that Vince describes are probably of greater interest to Vince than they were to me, although the ill-treatment of Italians in Monterey during World War II (one of many factors that might contribute to Vince's father's anger) is one of the novel's strong points. The Whale Chaser also makes it clear that there are more people in the world than those we encounter in our own tiny existence and that all those people have value equal to our own even if we never think about them.

It takes some time for the story to reach the dramatic moment (Chicago 1967) that explains why Vince moved to Canada. By that time, I had trouble caring. In any event, Vince's coming-of-age moment, like the rest of the Chicago story, is unoriginal. His second coming of age (or coming to maturity) moment (Canada 1980) is hokey.

At some point young Vince discusses Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of stories about characters who (depending on your perspective) have no choice about their fates or make unhappy choices or lack the courage to make choices that might make them happy. That seems to be the point of The Whale Chaser. Vince makes a choice or he responds to events in his life in the only way he can or he simply lacks the courage to face the reality of his life. I liked some of the book, primarily the Canadian setting and the prose, but nothing in the story generated a strong emotional impact. On the whole, I can only give this novel a guarded recommendation, more for its prose than for its intermittently intriguing content.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

And Sometimes I Wonder About You by Walter Mosley

Published by Doubleday on May 12, 2015

Walter Mosley has a unique ability to see the uncommon in common people, to perceive the humanity to which inhuman circumstances give birth. His characters are damaged and betrayed. They have been abused and they have been abusive. They often live on the fringes of society, yet they retain their dignity, their wisdom, and their strength. They reinvent themselves every day because that's what life is -- a process of reinvention. Few writers convey that as well as Mosley.

When a beautiful woman walks into Leonid McGill's life (or, at any rate, sits next to him on the train), he knows he is in for trouble. Five minutes later, Marella Herzog owes him $1,500, his fee for protecting her from an attacker who was supposedly sent by her former fiancé. Throughout And Sometimes I Wonder About You, McGill ruminates about the powerful women who dominate his life, including the wife who is receiving convalescent care, the dissatisfied part-time lover, the secretary who is finding ways to recover from a horrific childhood, and now Marella.

Also playing a vital role in the story is McGill's son Twill, who has taken on a private investigation of his own. Of course, his activities cause problems for McGill. And then there's Hiram Stent, a vagrant whose case McGill turns down until, inevitably, his sense of justice compels him to look into Hiram's problem by finding a missing woman. In the time-honored tradition of PI fiction, McGill is soon working for free, because helping those in need is the right thing to do. Before the end of the novel, McGill's sense of justice has made him the target of three groups of people who want to kill him. In other words, a typical day in McGill's life.

The family element -- not just with Twill, but also with McGill's absent father, whose absence ends in this novel -- is just as strong as the larger plot threads. As he so often does with consummate skill, Mosley weaves it all together to create a tight, fast-moving story that works as a thriller, as a family drama, as an unconventional love story, and as a psychological portrait of a man who is struggling to come to terms with his past and to invent a better future.

RECOMMENDED

Barefoot Dogs by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

Published by Scribner on March 10, 2015

The linked stories in Barefoot Dogs provide a different perspective on immigration. Many of the characters left Mexico to escape the country's problems, but they are not the impoverished workers sneaking over the border who dominate the news. Rather, the characters were doing well in Mexico -- some family members brought their servants with them when they came to the United States -- and they miss the relatives and friends and culture they left behind.

Having emigrated, the characters are generally not doing well. "Deer" is about two Mexican women who work at a McDonald's in Austin -- or they would be working, but for the bear that wandered in at breakfast time and began eating all the McMuffins. The woman narrating the story fears losing her job (and her ability to send money home to support her children) more than she fears the bear.

Two stories in the collection are excellent. "Origami Prunes" tells of two displaced Mexicans who begin an affair in an Austin laundromat. It is a story about the desire to escape, the pain of escaping, and the impossibility of escaping the past or the forward movement of time. Confrontation (or not) of fear and anxiety, by both children and adults, is the theme of "Okie." Bernardo feels isolated and out-of-place in his new home in California, but leaving Mexico was the only choice his parents could make.

The title story provides the connecting thread. It tells of Mexicans, now living in crowded quarters in Madrid, who moved after body parts of a kidnapping victim kept arriving in the mail. The narrator is challenged by caring for a baby and a vomiting dog in a strange land. Other stories also involve or touch upon the kidnapping, including one in which a woman needs to explain (or avoids explaining) to her son why her father has been absent for weeks. Another, "It Will Be Awesome Before Spring," is sort of a crime story, or a potential crime story, or a fear of crime story, told by a young woman who anticipates a visit to Italy without realizing that Mexico is no longer a place she can live. Much of the story is told with a curious detachment that causes it to lose its punch when it finally works its way around to a dramatic moment.

Some stories experiment with form, but not in a way that makes them inaccessible. One story, told entirely in dialog between a brother and sister staying in a shabby New York apartment, didn't work for me at all. Another story is a large block of text with no paragraphs. One is interrupted by single lines with phrases like WOW and WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME. One that I didn't particularly like is written from the perspective of a ghost. A key sequence in the title story might be a dream, but that isn't clear.

While the stories in Barefoot Dogs are uneven, they join together to form a larger story that exceeds the sum of its parts. The collection is worth reading for that reason, and for the unusual perspective it provides on expatriate Mexican life.

RECOMMENDED

Dry Bones by Craig Johnson

Published by Viking on May 12, 2015

A dispute over ownership rights to the bones of a T-Rex is complicated by the death of the landowner who accepted money from the High Plains Dinosaur Museum for the right to dig them up. The mess gets messier when the FBI intervenes, claiming that the bones are on public land and therefore belong to the United States government. The Cheyenne are also asserting a claim to the dinosaur remains. Walt Longmire would like the whole mess to go away but first he needs to solve the suspicious death of the landowner, which leads to a murder mystery with a half dozen suspects for the reader (and Walt, together with series regulars Lucian and Henry) to ponder.

Longmire is still having visions which, in the hands of most other writers, I would consider a cheesy gimmick, but the visions play only a minor role and they suit the offbeat stories that Craig Johnson tells. Longmire novels are always fun and this one is no exception. Walt's laconic wit and Craig Johnson's breezy style make the novels a joy to read. But, fun as it is, this Longmire novel is more moving than most. There is often family drama in a Longmire novel but Dry Bones introduces a family crisis that is sure to form the central plot in one of the upcoming novels. As always, I look forward to reading it.

RECOMMENDED

Solitude Creek by Jeffery Deaver

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 12, 2015

I generally like Jeffery Deaver, but he didn't sell me on the plot in Solitude Creek. Even if had not been contrived and implausible, it would not have been interesting. Admittedly, I approached this book with reservations, given my sense that Kathryn Dance, the fictional "body language expert" who works for the California Bureau of Investigation, is Deaver's least interesting character. Stories based on pseudo-voodoo like profiling and body language are too gimmicky for my taste. I am more tolerant of gimmicks when they don't get in the way of a good crime story, but the story here lacks originality.

Dance is working on the "drugs and guns pipeline" between Oakland and Mexico when, after apparently being fooled by a High Machiavellian (i.e., a really good liar), she is demoted to civil investigations. The pipeline reenters the story from time to time and eventually reaches a formulaic outcome (although with a mild twist that holds the novel's only real surprise). Meanwhile, Dance is assigned to check out the insurance coverage for a Monterey roadhouse called Solitude Creek after a fire produces a deadly stampede. Dance quickly realizes that the circumstances of the fire are suspicious -- not in the sense of insurance fraud, but in the sense of a deliberate attempt to induce panic.

The bad guy Dance is chasing explains that he is exploiting fundamental fears (primarily confinement and claustrophobia) to satisfy a compulsion that he calls "the Get." There is little to distinguish him from thousands of other crime novel villains who are driven by compulsion. His obsession with the "brilliant" and "captivating" Kathryn Dance after glimpsing her from afar is hard to swallow. In fact, not much about the bad guy is believable. His second motive to commit the crimes (apart from enjoyment) is spectacularly silly.

A subplot involving racist graffiti also seems contrived and improbable -- contrived in the way it comes back to connect with Dance and improbable in the sense that CBI is unlikely to devote so much effort to a property crime (even one that is classified as a hate crime) when a crazy man is committing acts that maim and kill dozens of people at a time in Southern California. True, the graffiti victims own expensive houses and are therefore likely to command the attention of the state's top cops, but no law enforcement agency would misplace its priorities in the way that Deaver imagines.

Too much of Solitude Creek feels like unnecessary padding. Deaver is particularly fond of describing footwear. Historical references to incidents of mass panic are only slightly more interesting. Dance's personal dilemmas (should she pick Jon or Michael?) do little to enliven her dull personality. Dance is always nattering on about her ability to recognize that someone is lying (it turns out that pretty much everything you say or do is proof that you are telling a lie). The best character development is reserved for Dance's messed up son, although his plot thread resolves in a way that is just as unbelievable as the rest of the novel. Her daughter's issues are just dull.

I never have a problem with Deaver's prose or with his ability to keep readers involved in the story's progress, but Solitude Creek seems to have been written on auto-pilot. Most of the novel proceeds at a good pace but it drags at points. Solitude Creek is a disappointing effort from a strong writer.

NOT RECOMMENDED