Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on July 11, 2023

Set in Louisiana during the Civil War, Flags on the Bayou is a departure from the crime novels that James Lee Burke usually writes. While the novel reads like a thriller, many of the crimes that inform the novel are crimes against humanity — slavery, the wholesale slaughter of war, enforced poverty, sexual abuse of women. Yet circumstances make key characters into killers, setting up a crime story about two women who must run from the law, women who (in a nineteenth century version of Thelma and Louise) would rather die than tolerate more abuse.

Near the end of 1863, Confederate soldiers are in retreat. By virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation, there are no more slaves, but not all plantation owners agree. Slaves continue to work in the fields while slave catchers continue to round them up, whether or not they have been emancipated, to sell them at slave auctions.  

Hannah Laveau is a (former) slave who lost track of her son at Shiloh. Hannah might be a witch. God might be talking to her. She might have mutilated and killed plantation owner Minos Suarez after he raped her. She wanted to kill him but isn’t sure whether she did. She might have done the same to her jailer.

Pierre Cauchon, a constable in charge of Negro affairs who is widely regarded as white trash, considers it his duty to bring Hannah to justice, but he must deal with the humiliations he has endured from Wade Lufkin, Hannah’s (former) owner. A duel with Lufkin scars Cauchon’s face but does not solve his problem. Nor does it resolve Lufkin’s tender feelings about Hannah or Cauchon’s about Darla Babineaux, a (former) slave owned by Suarez who refuses to work in the fields again. Wade and Cauchon are both tormented by guilt about the harm they have caused to others, just as they are tormented by love.

Florence Milton is a teacher and an abolitionist. Her skin is the right color to earn respect in the South, but she is regarded as a criminal because she works to help escaped slaves find their freedom. Her gender makes her a target regardless of her political beliefs.

Two characters, both brutal and crazed, represent the worst of the Union and Confederate officers. Colonel Carleton Hayes is a character who, more than any other, embodies evil. He commands hundreds of irregulars, fighting his own battles by unconventional means. He has slashed and burned his way through the war, destroying a Texas village because a woman spat on one of his men. Yet he considers himself an exemplar of southern manners and decorum. Captain John Endicott kills and rapes indiscriminately. Other soldiers say that Endicott does not represent the Union but they do nothing to stop him.

Burke is one of my favorite writers. His characters are complex, his stories move at a steady pace, and his prose is astonishing. His narration and dialog are always quotable:

Colonel Hayes: “There is no equal to poor white trash when they get their hands on a Bible.”

Hayes: “War is a confession of failure, and its perpetrators are the merchants of death, not because they are killers but because they never had the courage to live a decent life.”

Cauchon: “With regularity, North and South, we give power to people who have no interest in us.”

Cauchon: “You don’t need to seek revenge against your enemies. The bastards eventually fall in their own shite.”

Cauchon: “Never let them tell you that there is rhyme or reason to war, lest you join the lunatics who have perpetuated its suffering from the cave to the present.”

Burke never writes a novel based on a simplistic view of the world. He recognizes good and evil and understands the vast area of gray that separates them. Soldiers and officers from both the North and the South committed atrocities during the Civil War. Soldiers fought for pride more often than they fought for ideology. Soldiers from the North looted plantations and confiscated livestock that owners needed to feed their children. Soldiers from both sides raped women. There was no glory in the Civil War, no matter how often its battles are reenacted or its officers are commemorated.

Burke considers Flags on the Bayou to be his best novel. I think he said the same thing about The Jealous Kind (2016), a novel that I would probably put at the top of the list, but Flags on the Bayou belongs in his top five. It brings the tension and pace of a thriller as it encourages the reader to contemplate the moral issues that surround war in general, and the Civil War in particular.

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Happy Independence Day!

The Librarianist by Patrick DeWitt

Published by Ecco on July 4, 2023

Sometimes I finish a book and think, “I’m glad I read that.” On multiple occasions while reading The Librarianist, I thought, “I’m glad I’m reading this.” I didn’t need to wait for the end to know I was having a good time.

The Librarianist takes the reader on a journey through Bob Comet’s small and unremarkable life. Except that no life is unremarkable, even one as ordinary and seemingly uneventful as Bob’s. There’s always something that sets us apart from each other. That, I think, is the novel’s point. But the book also reminds us that “part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.” Only as we near the end of our time do we gain the perspective to appreciate the unique strangeness of the life we lived.

Bob begins the novel in 2006 as a librarian in Portland. He’s happy living a life in which he is surrounded by books that substitute for friends. He’s never done well with friends. His only adult friend ran off with his wife. Maybe his life hasn’t been so uneventful after all.

When Patrick DeWitt takes us a few decades into Bob’s past, we learn that Bob’s friend Ethan lived across the street from the library. Ethan was charming and handsome and a bit of a rogue. He met Bob when he ducked into the library to avoid someone lurking in his apartment who wanted to do him harm.

Bob also met Connie in the library when the head librarian banished her father from the premises. Connie was direct where Bob was shy. Connie was funny where Bob was reserved. Connie and Ethan met on the bus when they were both coming to see Bob. Bob loved them both but, for obvious reasons, regretted that his life brought them together.

So now Bob has the library and not much else. One day, Bob encounters a woman who is staring into space and helps her back to the senior center from which she has wandered. This leads Bob to a stint as a senior volunteer, although what Bob has to offer is unclear. The residents don’t seem interested in his lectures on Russian literature. Still, he becomes a fixture; his silent presence adds something of value. The volunteer work eventually connects Bob with his past in a surprising way.

When DeWitt takes another detour into Bob’s backstory, we learn that Bob’s past was more adventurous than his present might suggest. In 1945, Bob ran away from home. He latched onto two women while hiding in their train compartment. Ida and June were traveling thespians who performed for ever smaller crowds. Their dancing dogs were likely the highlight of their shows. They decided that Bob could be their drummer until something better came along.

Ida and June are quirky and given to witty observations, the kind of characters who are perfect for an offbeat comedy. If only people spoke in the formalities and circularities of Ida and June (neither pays much attention to what the other says about anything, except to disagree), the world would be a more entertaining place.

Bob ended up in a town that is the epicenter of a riot, but people in the town don’t take much of anything seriously, including the rioters. The townspeople all tend to be philosophical, including a sheriff who responds to the observation “everyone goes his own way in this world” with “you’ve got yourself a morbid point of view.” Few perspectives that Bob encounters are morbid; people generally seem happy to be part of the town’s life, even when that life doesn’t make much sense.

Most of the novel’s characters are happy enough, although sometimes in a melancholy way. Bob and Connie have thought about each other over the years, but life moves on. That too is the point of the story. We wonder about the things that did and did not happen in our lives, but the life we lived is the one we need to appreciate.

Every bit of this gentle story is delightful and surprising. Most of the novel maintains a tone of low-key amusement, but every now and then the subdued humor gives way to belly laughter. DeWitt reminds us that thriller heroes and dramatic moments don’t dominate the real world, even if they dominate fiction. Viewed properly, the small moments are just as satisfying.

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The Militia House by John Milas

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 11, 2023

The Militia House combines the story of a Marine deployed to Afghanistan with a horror story. War is horror even without a supernatural element, which might be the story’s point.

The novel begins as a conventional story of a soldier in Afghanistan. It has the uncertain feel of many debut war novels told by veterans who want to write about their military experience but aren’t sure what they want to say.

Alex Loyette is a corporal who leads three other Marines in the routine tasks associated with establishing landing zones for helicopters. Alex joined the Marines because he was failing in college. He wanted to make people think he was doing something important, but he didn’t care about military service. His brother was the war hero, someone who died after stepping on an IED, whose sacrifice meant more to others than to Alex. Alex knows he will never be a hero, will never be perceived in the same light as his brother.

Alex has given up on everything. He doesn’t want to try to live up to a potential that he can’t recognize. He doesn’t want to do good things or be a good person or please people who cared about him. He just wants to be left alone. He comes to realize that by joining the Marines, he ran away from one lost cause to join another.

The novel’s hook is a building just outside the wire called the Militia House. British soldiers claim that the Militia House is haunted. It was at one point occupied as barracks by Soviet soldiers who fought their last battle against the Taliban in its confines. Bullet holes riddle the interior walls.

Creepy events occur before Alex visits the Militia House. He sees a dog with porcupine quills stuck in its nose. Quills eventually turn up at other locations. Drawings pinned to the walls seem to change, as if they are being redrawn. A notebook in which Alex scribbles his thoughts reappears every time he burns it. One of Alex’s men talks in his sleep and appears to be sleepwalking.

The creepiest events occur in the Militia House, where time is distorted and a stairway to a basement appears and disappears. Alex should know better than to return to a haunted house, but when one of his team disappears, he leads the rest on a rescue mission. It doesn’t end well.

The novel captures the frustration of miliary life. John Milas establishes Alex’s backstory and insecurities effectively. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to the novel. Perhaps Alex is under the influence of the supernatural. Perhaps he’s gone off his nut. Whether the supernatural threats are meant to be taken seriously or are the product of Alex’s disturbed mind is never clear, although the reader sees little to suggest that Alex has any reason to be haunted by war. For that reason, the story feels insubstantial, even a bit pointless, despite some vivid images.

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Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo

Published in Italy in 2022; published in translation by Grove Press, Black Cat on June 27, 2023

Dysfunctional families can be charming, at least in Rome. As children, Verika and her more intelligent brother were rarely allowed to interact with a world that their protective parents regarded as far too dangerous. They devised meaningless games to escape boredom, games at which Verika invariably but pointlessly cheated. From this, Verika learned a life lesson. “Whenever I feel like I’m trapped in a room, in a game with rules, rather than try to escape from it I try to taint the logic of the room, of the rules.” She invents her own reality. Perhaps this reality invention makes Verika an unreliable narrator as she tells the reader her life story.

Both parents are strange. Verika’s father often says, “We have reached the height of paradox.” He loves to build walls, not just metaphorically. He has created multiple small rooms in their small apartment, cutting windows in half and making the bidet inaccessible. He wraps Verika in paper towels as a protection against perspiration, which he regards as the source of dangerous illnesses. Verika smells bad because her father thinks a good scrub with paper towels and alcohol is preferable to bathing.

Verika’s mother is convinced that her children are in danger and bombards them with calls when they are not in her presence. When Verika enters the world to attend school, her mother or father drives her or her brother walks with her, but their protectiveness cannot shelter her from the experience of life. Verika’s mother is horrified when Verika learns about the male appendage from a flasher who was lurking outside the school. When her mother tells her teacher “the girl believes she’s seen a wiener,” her classmates pass her sketches “that looked nothing at all like my vision of the reddish protuberance, which turned out to be reassuring.”

Yet for all their protectiveness, Verika’s parents are willing to let her visit a grandfather and sleep in his bed well beyond the age when a girl should be sharing a bed with an adult male relative. It isn’t clear that anything inappropriate happens, but it also isn’t clear whether Verika would recognize any activity as inappropriate, given her limited frame of reference.

Verika loses her fear of wieners when she learns that a girl can hold one in her hand (she finds one unexpectedly in her grasp while riding on a crowded tram and politely returns it to its owner). When she reaches her late teens, Verika has more experience with wieners but is less certain whether the things she’s done with them constitute sex. Those things seem to have been consensual, but Verika is lost in a world of her own, making it difficult to know whether she is suppressing the truth.

Lost on Me is Verika’s look back at her life. Verika tells her story factually (although not linearly), leaving it to the reader to deduce how the strange way in which was raised might have had an impact on her present. For the most part, Verika’s memories are amusing. To the extent they might be disturbing, Verika simply chooses not to be troubled by them. Her discussion of an abortion, for example, is unemotional. It’s just another thing that happened in her life.

As a young adult, Verika makes a number of discoveries in rapid order — about touch, about sex, about infidelity, about Berlin — although her narrative cuts those events into slices that she serves out of order. She is later astonished to learn how men can be so generous while asking so little in return — asking, that is, for something that means so little to her. She has boyfriends but she isn’t relationship material. She travels to Mexico with a female friend (where she is inevitably bombarded by calls from her mother) and later considers (without emotion) how that friendship just drifted away. The friend is easily replaced by Amory Blain, the main character in This Side of Paradise.

In the present, Verika and her brother are authors. Verika writes books when she’s staying with people in Berlin. Lost on Me is her latest. Because Verika is honest about her dishonesty, it is difficult to know when her narrative is meant to be reliable or even whether that matters. She describes a 14-year relationship with A, yet none of her friends seem aware of A’s existence, perhaps because A changes bodies. Is he any more real than Amory Blain? Verika’s mother sends texts to A on his own phone, so it’s hard to know. Maybe Verika is lying about the phone.

Verika describes her father’s death, her mother’s loneliness (reported in telephone calls ten times a day), her dismal efforts to conquer insomnia with pills and masturbation. She claims a fear of physical contact yet feels a need to watch others touching each other. She tells people vague stories about friends unseen for the last two years who have two-year old children. Two years seems a sensible distance and age when she has no clue about the true number.

One of the novel’s most interesting themes is the malleability of memory. Verika is untrustworthy not just because she tells deliberate lies but because her memories are hazy. They “change in the process of forming.” That’s true of all memory. Two witnesses will remember the same event in very different ways because that’s how memory works (or doesn’t work). Lost on Me is impressive in its honesty, even if the reader might not know what to believe, because Verika understands more than most of us that having a memory doesn’t mean the memory is true.

Identity (more precisely, Verika’s lack of identity) is another key theme. Verika claims she is regularly mistaken for a male, perhaps because she often wears male clothing. She is convinced that others do not recognize her, but perhaps they are strangers who have never seen her before. Even her grandfather always photographed her facing away from the camera, taking pictures of a back that could belong to anyone. At times, her mother sees someone else in a photo and believes it to be Verika. She has felt, at every moment of her life: “Oh whatever. Let’s just say this is me.”

The “fullest expression” of Verika’s identity is the manipulation of truth “as though it were an exercise in style.” She claims to keep a “glimmer of truth” inside her but confesses that she often forgets it or conflates it with the lie.

Lost on Me, with its ambiguous truths and confusions of reality, comes across as an exercise in style. While it seems to be narrated as a stream of consciousness, its loose structure belies its careful construction. Veronica Raimo ends the novel by confessing that she writes “things that are ambiguous, frustrating.” She also says she’s “fine with that.” Readers who are not fine with ambiguity should probably look for a more concrete story. While Lost on Me can be frustrating, it is also an intriguing exploration of the often illusory distinction between truth and fantasy.

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