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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
"Soul Circus"
By George P. Pelecanos
341 pages
Little, Brown
Order from Powells.com
Maybe it's because he's been at it for so long that George P. Pelecanos' detective Derek Strange has amassed such a great music collection. But it's nice to fantasize that Strange has discovered some amazing record store where any disc of '70s soul or any western movie soundtrack is there for the asking. (If Strange knows where I can find a copy of Wilbert Harrison's 1969 comeback album, I'm all ears.) His choices of music suggest the dance party going on in Derek Strange's head -- "Ennio Morricone, meet Harold Melvin. Elmer Bernstein, meet the Spinners." The music defines Strange: the quiet, steadfast tenderness of the great dramatic soul ballads, and the alternately stark and bombastic themes of the lone righteous man staring down his enemies.
Strange can separate those western fantasies from his work on the streets of Washington, D.C., unlike his white partner Terry Quinn (an ex-cop like Strange). When Terry quotes Ernest Borgnine's famous line from "The Wild Bunch" ("When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can't do that, you're like some animal") you know that, beneath the irony, he's serious. And when he quotes the line William Holden speaks before leading his men into a suicidal showdown ("Let's go") there's no irony at all. Despite Strange's imprecations to Terry about letting go of the anger he feels at the resentment he stirs up on the street, you sense that Terry is beyond learning.
"Soul Circus" (great title!) is the third of Pelecanos' novels about the uneasy partnership between the African-American Strange and the Irish-American Quinn -- it's also the best and the bleakest. Pelecanos shares a kinship with Kris Nelscott. His books might be described as accounts of how you carry on after the worst future that Smokey Dalton can imagine has come to pass. "Soul Circus" finds Strange's personal life settled down. He's married his longtime lady friend Janine, and happily taken on the role of father to her teenage son, Lionel. The horrors that surround Strange on the job serve to make that life more precious and fragile.
The split in Strange's life between the domestic and the violent is emphasized here by two of the plotlines, neither of which allows Strange to pretend his hands are clean. And also by a new character, Ulysses Foreman, who might be Strange's Bizarro World opposite. An ex-cop like Strange and Quinn, Foreman has found satisfaction in becoming a gun runner, hiring young women (preferably junkies) with no rap sheet to cross the river into Virginia and make use of the state's instant background check on gun purchases. Foreman sells the goods his couriers bring back, thus handily evading the D.C. handgun ban.
It's that kind of outraged muckraking that makes you feel "Soul Circus" is, if not telling you something you didn't know, confirming what you'd suspected. This may be the most violent of Pelecanos' books, and if the violence sometimes flirts with pulp grimness, it also sticks; it's never a kick. Along with the increased level of violence is a sure-footed black humor. Pelecanos doesn't work up much sympathy for the young men living out their gangsta fantasies -- they're beyond redemption. But he can make the narrowness and thuggishness of their actions horribly funny. In one scene, two sets of young men about to kill each other in some idiotic street squabble over turf and "respeck" sit in their respective cars listening to Missy Elliott declaim that she don't want no one-minute man and wonder what she's complaining about. Pelecanos' dialogue reads like some collaboration between the pitch-perfect realism of Richard Price and the ear for skewed, comic speech that is one of Elmore Leonard's gifts. It's terse and precise with rhythms that catch you on the rebound.
Like Kris Nelscott, Pelecanos has a liberal sensibility with a conservative component. Derek Strange believes that strong male role models will make a difference to the young men who could go either way. While some of the ways Strange goes about that -- coaching a junior football team, for instance -- may seem to come from a quainter time, they also stand for a refusal to believe that the young kids he meets are unreachable. And Pelecanos' outraged asides on the politicians who oppose gun laws while decrying rap and Hollywood as the bane of society let you know he's aware of the bigger causes of the problems.
If Pelecanos' view is grim, it isn't hopeless. Alongside the violence of the communities he writes about are the portraits of people trying to live their lives as they always have -- in diners and bars and churches. Yes, George Pelecanos is writing the sharpest and smartest urban thrillers around. He's also holding up the tradition of novelist as social reporter, with none of the preaching that might entail, and all the craft and toughened compassion you could want.
