Savages by Don Winslow

I've long been an admirer of Don Winslow's crime fiction. One of the things I like about his work is that, no matter how light or entertaining his novels appear to be, one comes away from them having learned something. For example,  California Power and Light is a veritable degree course in fire insurance investigation. I've used bits of information gleaned from that book on a number of occasions. While in Power of the Dog- one of the best crime novels to appear over the last two decades- you learn pretty much  everything you need  to know about Mexican drug cartels and their relationship to law enforcement in the US and south of the border.

Which brings me to Savages. I was really looking forward to this one, having heard it combined his two prime subjects- surfers/slackers and Mexican drug cartels. That it does, and even though it noir to the core,  I was disappointed. Savages centers on  two guys- one a hardcore, former soldier, the other a green-minded son of two psychotherapists- who make a very good living producing  and selling high quality weed, until, that is, they run afoul of the Mexican drug cartel. They have an off and on menage-a-trois with a young woman, not quite an airhead but not far  from being one. The head of the cartel-  a woman with a daughter not unlike the young woman living with our two drug dealers- wants to horn in on the action of our two protagonists. Of course, she has to watch her back when it comes to rivals within the cartel. Nothing wrong with the plot or the politics of the novel. The problem comes with the way both are executed. Because, for me, Savages came across  as a comic-book version of Winslow's two favorite concerns, and ends up being far too lightweight and frivolous, when compared with Power of the Dog.  Moreover, it lacks the informative background material  I have to expect from Winslow's fiction.

There's also the matter of Winslow writing style which I have also long admired, particularly his use of short, cryptic chapters, that can sometimes seem like something close to poetry. But in Savages he uses that style throughout the book, mixed with a vocabulary which mirrors and often mocks his characters.  Not that Savages isn't  entertaining- I read it on the train from London to Paris, which made the trip pass in no time at all- but I expected more from the novel.  Still, I'm not going to let one disappointing novel put me off reading him in the future. I hope Savages is simply Winslow biding his time before he drops his next epic novel on his readers.




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A Handbook of American Prayer by Lucius Shepard

This is yet another excellent Concord Press free book (in exchange for a donation to your favorite charity). A perceptive writer and original stylist, Shepard, over the years, has ventured into various genres, describing the lives of those on the margins of the culture.  Considering the role religion still plays in American politics and public life, A Handbook of American Prayer is as relevant a novel as one is going to read this year.  It's a dark tale that  revolves around Stuart Wardlin, a violent brawler yet strangely innocent, who, while serving a prison sentence for murder, writes a best-selling, self-help book about something called prayerstyle- a DIY style of prayer that combines poetry and wish-fulfillment. While inside he corresponds with a woman whom he eventually marries, and the two of them move to nowhere, Arizona. Having mellowed, Wardlin becomes, in no time at all, a cult hero, but one who can't  escape  the product and celebrity status he's created. Of course, in rejecting God and organized religion,  prayerstyle falls foul of the representatives of God Inc.. Wardlin, who, as Shepard has said, cons himself in order to con others, is eventually visited by a character from his own prayerstyle, the Lord of Loneliness who functions as a 21st century Grand Inquisitor. The plot, though sounding far-fetched, is, as Russell Banks says in his introduction, all too plausible. My favorite passage might be when Wardlin is visited by his own metaphorical creation, who explains to Wardlin his entropic theory:

"Neolithic culture, they didn't have time or the wherewithal to produce anything except what they needed to survive...Maybe they carved toys for the kids. Toy mammoths and shit. That's about it. But as societies grew more sophisticated, more technologically competent, the more trivial, whimsical objects they produced. Now we're in the Golden Age of the trivial and the whimsical. Eventually society will produce nothing but trinkets. Everything will have been trivialized. Every resource trashed, every idea reduced to a slogan, every boulderlike edifice crumbled into rubble. We'll inhabit a landscape of lizard-shaped ashtrays and digital crickets and Harry Potter oven mittens. Art will be manufactured, not ripped from the soul. Greatness defined by merchandisers. Love that once inspired poetry, novels, symphonies, and inspires pop songs...it'll inspire some even more vapid form of insignificance. Hell, we're almost there. Your book's perfect example. You've taken that whole burning-bush, heavenly-glory thing and marketed it as your basic build-a-Jehovah kit. That's why I admire it so much. It's cutting-edge."

Shepard not only savages the role of religion, celebrity culture and the need for easy answers, if not  instant gratification, but addresses issues of masculinity, and the mis-use of language, as well as the relationship between between prayer and poetry. Whether we're in the final stage of the age of me or not,  Lucius Shepard has  again written another provocative, entertaining and important novel.


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Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder the writer might not be as incisive and exact as Ry Cooder the musician, but, for me, the near-amateurish quality of Los Angeles Stories constitutes part of its charm. Not that it's badly written, it's just that those who've covered other aspects of this terrain-  Cain, Chandler, Ellroy, Fante, Mike Davis, Joan Didion, DJ Waldie- have set the bar extraordinarily high. Still, Los Angeles  Stories is more than admirable, coming across as the work of someone trying not only to resurrect the past, but to make sense of it, while, at the same time, looking for a way to tell a story,  trying things out on the page. That Ry has long been able to mix musical styles with tasteful flourishes only adds to the mix, generating its own demand and interest.

For me, these stories, whatever their surface deficiencies, function like a memory theater, conjuring up  an LA of fifty to sixty years ago, with its anti-Communist witch-hunts, Red Cars, City Directory, Bunker Hill rooming houses, downtown burlesque houses, bowling alleys and, of course, music, whether country, jazz or Mexican.  It was a time when Town Hall Party was on TV every Saturday night, Jazz Man record store was still situated on W. Pico, Pershing Square rang out with gospel singers, preachers and Oakie wannabes, radio stations like KGFJ and KXLA blasted across the airwaves, Chavez Ravine was little more than a dusty neighborhood and Angel Annie's voice could be heard behind third base at Wrigley Field. Ry writes about that time, centering on ordinary and forgotten, people, whether jobbing musicians, dental technicians, petty criminals and scam artists. Then there are those who make peripheral appearances, like d.j. Hunter Hancock, legendary guitar honchos Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, and the infamous cross-gender pianist and band-leader Billy Tipton.  I found myself wishing Cooder had written more about Tipton, who undoubtedly deserves a novel all her own. 

Like Ry, I grew up in the twilight years of that period and rarely a day passes when I don't travel back there in my mind. So even though Los Angeles Stories might be something of a one-trick pony, it has charm and no small amount of historical value. Likewise, it doesn't surprise me that Cooder should have branched off into story writing. Because this book also works as an addendum to Cooder's recent albums Chavez Ravine, I, Flathead and Pull Up Some Dust, which exists as texts in their own right. Los Angeles Stories reflects the fact that Cooder's music has become increasingly narrative and political. But then Ry's a product of the Ash Grove, where the civil rights movement and the Peace and Freedom Party rubbed shoulders with Lightnin Hopkins, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Stu Jamieson and Sleepy John Estes. As anyone who was there can attest, it was a time and place from which no one escaped unscathed.http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php

Give + Take by Stona Fitch

Judging by what's out there, writing a decent crime/noir novel about music must be difficult. In fact, you can probably count the good ones on one hand and still have a couple fingers leftover to pluck out Blue Monk on the piano. Which is strange since crime/noir fiction and music, or, at any rate, jazz, have always been inextricably linked. In his latest novel Give +Take (published by Two Ravens Press), Stona Fitch manages to carry it off and then some. This isn't just an excellent novel about a working jazz musician- in this instance, Ross Clifton, a lounge piano player schooled in the likes of Monk, James P. Johnson and the Great American Songbook- it's also about a working thief who, when not improvising on melodies, steals BMW's from rich motorists and diamonds from wealthy women. A talented but, in the end, pedestrian musician with gifted hands, Clifton is anything but an ordinary thief. After all, this is someone  goes out of his way to give away what he makes from his one man blitz on conspicuous consumption, stuffing any profits into anonymous mailboxes, dumping it in trashcans or throwing it on side of the road.  Meanwhile, Ross'  brother, who makes his living as a counterfeiter, sends his sixteen year old son, Cray, to his uncle mostly to put some of those ersatz bills  into circulation. The idea being if we live by a fiat currency, then counterfeiting becomes something close to a legitimate business. Though reckless, immature, and forever driving his uncle up the wall, Cray is no fool, but intelligent enough to comment to his uncle that, although his financial contributions might be making people happy in the short-term, eventually the money will run out that they will have to return to their miserable lives.

As well as being a fast-moving, dark and often humorous novel that focuses on the politics of crime in our present economic climate, Give+Take is also something of a road novel. So Ross moves from town to town, playing various types of establishments, always with an eye out as to how to play the crowd, milking them for all their worth, extracting from them whatever he wants, whether applause, or getting them to part with their money.  His never-ending itinerary, arranged by his agent provocateur, Malcolm, invariably overlaps with  jazz torch singer Marianne London. When the two finally meet they immediately fall for one another, only for Ross to discover that Marianne has her own line in scams, preying on elderly rich men just as he preys on rich women. But together, giving as well as taking, they discover that everything comes at a cost, and even the best laid scams can sometimes go astray. 

This is no simplistic anti-capitalist screed, but a novel that examines what it takes to get by in a world under economic siege,  while questioning the ethics of the black economy, and considering where work ends and crime begins. Certainly, anyone who enjoyed the knife-edge quality of Fitch's earlier fiction, in particular the nerve-jangling Senseless, will want to read Give+Take.  If you haven''t read Senseless, with its anti-globalist theme, you'll want to once you've finished this book. Both are  intelligent crime novels with incisive social commentaries written by one of the best practitioners of the genre around.  But there is even more to Fitch than his critique of the culture. Because this former jobbing musician has recently put his money where his pen often strays, with the establishment of Concord Press (stonafitch.com) which gives away its high quality books by formidable writers like Scott Phillips and Lucious Sheppard, in exchange for a charity donation (a concept that fits perfectly with the title Give+Take) and the promise the book on to someone else.  In this day of corporate publishing, celebrity-oriented lists, and the pursuit of profit margins over literary quality, we need more publishers like Concord Press and more books like Give+Take.http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php

Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfield

"The rich Jews would soon find a compromise with Fascism. So long as their profits were safe, they didn't mind who was in the saddle, but when their fat bellies were hurt, they squeaked, they marched, they shouted; in a year, two years, they'd raise some other red herring. Last time, the Arabs were the villains, now the Germans. But this contingent wasn't being fooled. Their quarrel was not with the German workers or the Arab workers. Their enemies were the bosses, whatever their religion, whatever their language."

The provocatively titled Jew Boy was first published in the UK in 1935 and, a year later,  in the US under the more acceptable title The Iron Garden. I first came across it in the late 1980s, when it was reprinted by Lawrence & Wishart. At the time, thanks to Compendium bibliophiles like Nick Kimberly, Mike Hart, and historian Ken Worpole, whose Dockers and Detectives was an illuminating and groundbreaking work, I was obsessed by the "London novel" both in the past and the present. I think I also must have heard about the novel through  the timely exhibition,  20,000 Streets Under the Sky- the London Novel, sponsored by the GLC at the Royal Festival Hall, which featured  London writers I'd read,  like Patrick Hamilton and Norman Collins, as well as those that, at the time, I'd never heard of, like Emmanuel Litminov, Ashley Smith, James Curtis, Alexander Baron and Mark Benney. At the time I tried to get hold of various books mentioned in the exhibition, and Worpole's book, particularly those set in London's East End. At the time one of the most interesting titles was Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfeld.

When I got around to reading Jew Boy, it definitely did not disappoint.  Blumenfeld's first novel (he would write three other novels: Phineas Kahn in 1937, Doctor of the Lost in 1938 and They Won't Let You Live in 1939) is  a political as well as coming of age narrative. Blumenfeld obviously draws upon upon his early days in the East End. The book's  protagonist, Alec, though drawn to the Communist party, is looking for a way out of his claustrophobic East End community, and moves to Hackney to live with a "shiksa." Yet he  returns to join the Communist Party and the book end with a note of revolutionary triumphalism, all the more poignant for its failure. I not only liked the narrative, but the way Blumenfeld, born in 1907, sought to turn a derogatory term  into a badge of honor, not dissimilar from the way Tottenham Hotspurs would call themselves the yids as a way to identify with the same anti-fascist movement that Blumenfeld was part of. Jew Boy, if nothing else, is a wonderful portrait of pre-war East End Jewish life, populated by recent arrivals from Russia and Poland, with its tenements, sweat shops, boxers, anarchists, Yiddish theatre and discussion groups, so well depicted by in William Fishman's The Streets of East London. It was a culture that produced writers and intellectuals politically well to the left, who preferred Marx to Theodore Herzl, a socialist Britain to a future Israel.

As customary with London Books, Jew Boy comes with an excellent introduction, this one from the aforementioned Ken Worpole. From it we learn that Blumenfeld was the son of a cap-maker. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a chicken-slaughterer, cap-maker, presser, and street-market trader. In the evenings he liked to box and talk  politics with his friends. During his early days he wrote a play in Yiddish, performed at the Grand Palais on Commercial Road, of the last performances of its kind in Europe.  Though he wouldn't publish any more fiction after 1939, he did write a drama about the Aldgate boxer Danny Mendoza and another, The Battle of Cable Street, which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1987.  A lifelong Marxist, he worked for the New Left Review and was one of the founders of what would become the Unity Theatre in King's Cross for which he wrote two plays, as well as the Workers Theatre Movement.  Until shortly before his death in 2005, Blumenfeld was still contributing a weekly column in Stage magazine.  But it's Jew Boy for which Blumenfeld will no doubt be best remembered. A companion novel to John Summerfield's excellent May Day, also published by London Books, Blumenfeld's novel, even though it depicts a past that's gone forever, still packs a powerful personal and political punch that has present day reverberations. No wonder the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers helped support the publication of the book. Jew Boy is yet another true London classic.


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