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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Beebo Brinker
By Ann Bannon
Cleis Press, 211 pages
Greenwich Village in the 1950s offers a backdrop for this classic lesbian pulp-fiction novel, first published in 1962, newly reissued in paperback and endorsed by Dorothy Allison and Joan Nestle. Forty years on, readers can look back at a plot trajectory -- boy meets girl; girl meets bad girl; girl meets good girl; girl meets closeted-superstar girl; girl finds true love -- that melds mistaken identities and molten love scenes, via melodramatic prose, into a satisfying whole.
Things begin with Jack Mann, a fairy godfather and war veteran comfortable with his love of "volatile, charming, will-o-the-wisp boys." Jack spots Beebo Brinker, 4 inches taller than he and freshly fallen off a Greyhound bus. Offering a meal, shelter, peppermint schnapps and sympathy, he learns her story as we do: a misunderstood Wisconsin farm girl, tall, tanned and strong, but unable to shoulder the burden of not fitting into the small-town feminine roles expected of her.
Soon enough, our heroine (who couldn't pronounce "Betty Lou," her name, as a child) takes center stage. Her job driving a pizza delivery truck brings her into the orbits of local siren Mona Petry, femme not-so-fatale Paula Ash and high-profile Hollywood actress Venus Bogardus. The trio's soft shoulders and dangerous curves provide high entertainment value, no matter where you fall on the Kinsey scale.
Watching our heroine's choices, you see plainly the uncertainty, the tentative quality of youth when it's new to the adult world's unspoken codes of behavior and desires, changing from inchoate to incarnate, ice to water to steam and back again. You wind up with a stake in the book's hard-earned happy ending, so different from the doomed love and downfall common in the lesbian pulp novel plots of its time. From moment to moment, Beebo's willingness to battle propriety, lovers, husbands and her own fears for the sake of her lady loves earns her readers' respect. This is pulp fiction any reader would be proud to peruse.
-- George Kelly
Bitterroot
By James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster, 336 pages
Nobody does cathartic male rage like James Lee Burke. While his villains are always the planet's most loathsome filth -- rapists, child molesters, dirty cops, white supremacists -- and his heroes the moral avengers who bring them down, the lure of Burke's fiction is that his good guys understand they need the bad guys, and shudder at what they know they have in common.
Burke's latest novel, "Bitterroot," can't quite match the New Orleans noir of his bestselling "Purple Cane Road." The landscape is Montana -- stunning, but less seductive and malevolent -- and his hero is no Dave Robicheaux, though they have a lot in common. Billy Bob Holland is an exiled Texas Ranger turned Montana lawyer, trying to help his old friend Doc -- a preacher turned Navy SEAL turned radical environmentalist -- when Doc's daughter's rapists start turning up dead, and Doc becomes a murder suspect. Both stories are populated by an underworld of vicious bikers, fallen cops and other lowlifes, sensitive young men turned into killers by prison rape, tough but vulnerable teenage girls and middle-aged women -- all set against a backdrop of alcoholism, Catholicism, race-mixing and semisteamy romance, with a brawl every few dozen pages.
The emotional power of both books comes from their heroes' lonely self-knowledge and their struggles with self-control. Holland, like Robicheaux, is an angry loner who is all too aware of his own love affair with rage and violence. Unlike the Cajun cop, he's not a recovering alcoholic, but the seduction of alcohol and dissolution is strong in both books. Burke understands the grandiosity, the black-and-white worldview and the addiction to drama that's at the heart of being an alcoholic or an avenging hero. And his heroes recognize that they need to knock somebody's teeth out the same way they need to go on an occasional bender -- because losing control just feels so good. They're always grappling with the unsettling question just at the edge of consciousness: Where would all this fury go if they couldn't beat the shit out of bad guys?
The world of women in Burke's fiction occasionally edges toward the creepy. There's a sex crime at the heart of both books: Doc's daughter's rape in "Bitterroot," years of molestation endured by the Labiche twins in "Road." And the heroes' love objects almost always have disturbing sexual secrets -- Robicheaux's wife Bootsie had an affair with dirty cop Jim Gable; in "Bitterroot" Holland's first love interest, Cleo Lonigan, also slept with the bad guys. Yet he also pairs his heroes with strong female cops, and their partnerships have real chemistry, which in "Bitterroot" turns into an oddly sweet, simple love affair that is the book's lone haven from darkness.
The flaw of "Bitterroot" is Burke's failure to pick a villain. There are just too many of them here, all the evil of Americana on display -- Holland is up against the Mafia, mining interests, corrupt and drug-addled Hollywood celebrities, inept federal agents, prison gangs, and oh yeah, white supremacists. And even with all those bad guys, the hunt for Doc's enemies -- why was his daughter raped, and who killed her rapists? -- never gains the emotional intensity of Robicheaux's search for his mother's killers, which is really his attempt to solve the mystery of whether she died a prostitute or a lovelorn barmaid, and why she left him. Still, Burke fans will enjoy the mix of testosterone, spirituality, lust and longing in "Bitterroot" while waiting for Robicheaux's return.
-- Joan Walsh
White Darkness
By Steven D. Salinger
Crown Publishers, 416 pages
Moses Rosen, a single, 40-ish jewelry store owner who can't seem to push baubles and trinkets as well as his father did before him, frets about the steadily growing West Indian population and the new smells and sounds they've brought to his once-Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood. But when Moses saves Miz Ark, the Haitian woman who runs the popular restaurant next door, from a mugger, his lonely world bursts wide open -- with good and bad results.
Suddenly, his store is flooded with local customers who believe anything that Moses touches will bring them good luck; he becomes a beloved member of the community and meets a beautiful young waitress from Miz Ark's restaurant. Yet Miz Ark brings with her a dark history and a shady connection to a lusty and sinister West Indian colonel who's slowly making his way to Brooklyn.
Steven T. Salinger's "White Darkness" is a thriller seasoned with mismatched lovers, desperate immigrants, CIA plots and stolen jewels, set amid the voodoo and corruption of Haitian politics and the vibrant street life of Brooklyn. Salinger has some witty and serious things to say about immigrant life in America, and he's at his best (and seems to have the most fun) when he meshes different worlds together unexpectedly. For example, when a Cuban boat ends up in American waters after a terrible storm, Salinger serves up five pages of hilarious dialogue between the elderly, polite Cuban captain and the swaggering, pea-brained American sailor who can't meet him halfway on the language barrier.
Salinger often ventures into the thicket of racial, national and class resentments, but he's way too crafty a writer to let such meditations slow down the good vs. bad, "Who's gonna get it?" pace of his plot. Instead, those realities serve as a balance to the more fantastical notions in the book -- the strangely influential presence of l'wahs or voodoo spirits, say, who always seem to tip off the bad guy just in the nick of time. Salinger has created a truly shadowy and menacing villain, as well as a spunky, resilient community that keeps you rooting for them until the end.
-- Suzy Hansen
