From Drive to Driven: James Sallis' Plus-Perfect Noir

If  the title of James Sallis' latest is anything to go by, one could say that noir, at least in a classical sense, is best suited for the past perfect. Yet it's the present that Sallis has always exploited so impressively, not least of all in his latest novel. Though Driven is the sequel to Drive, it should, grammatically speaking, be a prequel. Or maybe that's wishful thinking, because, for me, sequels- disregarding the likes of Macdonald or Crumley who recycle the same character rather than taking the narrative a step further-  are often disappointing, the energy and impact often dissipating with each  installment. But the Arizona-based Driven is an exception that must prove the rule, and, if not Sallis at the very top of his game, one to savour until the next one comes around.

So this is a further investigation regarding Driver's  hitherto impenetrable motives and manners, as well as a novel  that, as usual for Sallis, is firmly within the noir tradition. Though in the past his novels have sometimes functioned as marginalia to the likes of Goodis and Himes, Driven, like its predecessor, reads like  the great French polar writer Jean-Patrick Manchette has finagled  a Green Card, and is currently living incognito in the suburban sprawl around Phoenix, writing as if he were back in the day when  Gold Medal and Lion paperbacks ruled the roost.

As with Manchette, and his pulp predecessors, Sallis is skilled at editing, deploying David Mamet's maxim about arriving at a scene late and leaving it early. Likewise, Sallis is adept at juxtaposing chapters, and paring everything down to its expositional essentials, deploying dialogue that gets to the point whatever that point might be. But, then, that's the pulp tradition, practised by the likes Prather, Macdonald, Marlowe, etc... And like his French comrade, Sallis even gives his peripheral characters  something to say, whether sad stories or pearls of wisdom. Despite such humanitarian leanings, Sallis here depicts life on the verge of disintegration, in the process of being replaced by something to which his characters can only be tenuously connected. Consequently, Driver's chances of survival can only be minimal. In this desert landscape, pock-mocked by cities approaching  their sell-by date, Driver at least has the ability to modify and operate cars. A former stunt-man who would walk the straight and narrow if he only had the space to do so, this anonymous anti-hero's days are numbered. After all, anyone attempting to drive through the wreckage, is living on borrow time,  dependent on road-kill, the price of Middle-East oil and insane gun laws. As a sequel, Driven delves below the surface that was Drive, and a king-of-the-road survivor who, like the editing technique imposed on him, is destined to arrive late and leave early. Driven might be a reprise, but if you're Driver, and the highway is your narrative thread, retracing your steps has to be a cultural necessity. And the road is bound to be  convoluted, not so different from the narrative in which he's embedded. Yet, like they say about railway tracks, at some point, it all connects, or, in this case, coheres. Or comes as close to cohering as things do in a Sallis novel.

Finally, I'm probably in a minority on this, but I was greatly disappointed by the film adaptation of Drive. I felt it was trying to push too many buttons, while, at the same time, trying too hard to be ironic. What's more, it seemed too mired in  the 1980s, as opposed to Sallis' fiction which, though it recognizes and plays upon the history of noir, is indelibly set in the over-anxious present. But I should also add that my take on the film has nothing to do with the acting, which was excellent, or any similarity it might have to Walter Hill's 1978 The Driver.  For me, there's  room for any number of car movies- Two Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, Thunder Road, etc.. No, for me the problem lay, sadly, in the director misperception of the novel. A good comparison would be Boorman's Point Blank adapted from Richard Stark's novel, a film, like the novel, and in contrast to Drive, devoid of nostalgia and irony. My reaction to Refn's film came as a surprise since I've been an admirer of his past work, not just Pusher, but the remarkable Fear X, whose underrated virtues I've extolled to any number of people. On the other hand, I can see that it might be difficult to adapt adapting Sallis' work. Not just finding the right tone, but how to convey the internality of Sallis' sentences in a simple gesture or line of dialogue. Of course, film dialogue operates on a different level than it does on the page. All of which is to say that  if Driven should ever be adapted for the screen, I hope its director will be familiar with  not only 1980s crime films like Live and Die in L.A., but the history of noir, and its relevance to the present. Perhaps such a director doesn't  exist,  or even if he or she does, it's  likely that no studio would want  to live so  dangerously. Life, in Driven, might be a simulacrum of a movie, but it's neither glittering nor seductive. It just is.

Scott Phillips, Andrey Kurkov: Crimes, Predators and Penguins

These days I find  I'm more often than not reading more than one book at a  time, dipping into one, then the other as the mood strikes me, not quite channel-surfing but more like alternating between my favorite programs.  What I find interesting  is how these books have a tendency to echo each other and sometimes merge together, whether in terms of theme or narrative. Or maybe that's simply a reflection of my reading habits, politics and interests.  Sometimes I even find myself placing the character one novel into the narrative of another.

It can sometimes get pretty strange. Recently, I read Scott Phillips' excellent The Adjustment in tandem with Ukrainian Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin.  On the surface these two novels have little in common. Yet both   are imbued with their own particular brand of dark humor. While Phillips bears the indelible mark of Cain (James M. and Paul), Kurkov occupies the edges of Euro-noir, but never succumbing to the genre's  more mundane elements. The Adjustment, set in Wichita, is written in the first person, and the Kiev-set Death and the Penguin in the third, yet both concern protagonists who negotiate some very tricky terrain, both manipulated by and  manipulating the system.  Kurkov's protagonist, Viktor, has to look after a penguin recently liberated from the local zoo, while Phillips' main character looks after a  lascivious, drug-addled boss. And even though penguins are noticeably absent from The Adjustment, Phillips' novel does contain a number of sexually available women and predatory men, not one of them as cuddly as Kurkov's narrative foil. Kurkov's book might be the lighter of the two, but it concerns and is written from,  a very dark, and often surreal, political situation. Moreover, both protagonists have a way with the written word. Wayne Ogden, an educated man recently having returned from WW2 where he participated in the spiv economy, uses words to his advantage in dealing with others, whether his wife, other women or his fellow aircraft workers. Whereas Viktor pens obituaries for those who've yet to die, only to find that his obits  become hot news and he becomes increasingly embroiled in a world of organized crime and politics. No wonder that I occasionally found myself  transplanting Viktor in Scott's book and Ogden in Kurkov's book. And in both cases, writing style aside, they more or less fit.

The Adjustment might be stylistically less literary than Phillips' The Ice Harvest and Walkaway, and less stylized than his uproarious, revisionist western Cottonwood, but it's still an appealing book, peeling back the layers of post-WW2 society,  the undercurrents of which I'm still thinking about two weeks later.  Kurkov, on the other hand, not only inhabits the margins of Euro-noir, but he's in that Bulgakov/Platanov tradition of political satire. Though his book includes a small animal and a little girl, it's not a cute novel, but is biting and bittersweet as a piece sun-drenched chocolate. Stripped to its essentials, Kurkov's prose is every bit as hardboiled as Phillips', though it comes from a different angle, a different culture, and a different literary tradition. Kurkov writes, "The crazy idealist was extinct- survived by the crazy pragmatist." While I've long been a fan of Scott's fiction, I'll definitely be trying to get hold of some of Kurkov's other work.  For Kurkov's sideways take on current Ukraine politics have a look at the following Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/06/ukraine-politicians-trust-tymoshenko.

Working-Class Pre-War London Noir

As well as an excellent novel, Scamp is a valuable piece of London literary and social history that, in an age of multi-culturalism, instant publishing and networking, has probably been lost forever. Camberton, real name Henry Cohen, was born in Manchester and raised  in pre-war, working class Hackney. What first hits you about this book is the cover  by the renowned artist John Minton, reproduced from the original Lehmann edition in 1950. But it's not only the packaging but the contents of the novel that is going to impress any interested reader. Standing the test of time, Scamp  focuses on Ivan Ginsberg, a young would-be author and editor who flits between  Bloomsbury and the back streets of Soho and Fitzrovia, trying to put together a literary magazine that bears the same title as the novel itself.  To get the magazine off the ground, he has to find the money to finance it, a printer to publish it, and contributors to write for it. To do this, he plays off one against the other two, telling each that the other two exist. It's a typical literary hustle in a world where the printed word meant something. Living in a filthy rented room in Bloomsbury notable for its  congealed fat in the frying pan and dirty dishes in the bath-tub, Ivan  perambulates the streets of London, from a Charlotte Street pub where he mixes with the local bohemians to cafes in Fleet Street where he breakfasts with a variety of newspaper hacks and printers. A flanuer novel about literary hustling, Camberton writes evocatively about the night life and those inhabiting it-  crooks, homosexuals, prostitutes, bookies, sex seekers and hardboiled tough-guys- as well as the likes of the well-endowed Mrs Chabbers who would like to take Ivan- her bit of rough trade- to the Riviera, or the millionaire book collector and slum landlord who dresses like a tramp. This edition published by Five Leaves in their New London series comes with an informative introduction by Iain Sinclair- probably the only place you are going to be able to read about what little is known of Camberton's life. On its own, Scamp  ranks up there with Simon Blumenfeld's Jew Boy, John Summerfield's May Day, and Alexander Baron's Lowlife. It should also be noted that New London Editions publish two excellent Baron novels: Rosie Hogarth and King Dido, as well as Camberton's Rain on the Pavements.
The latter  comes with another evocative John Minton cover. Set in Hackney, and originally published in 1951, Rain On the Pavements is clearly more autobiographical than Scamp. Consisting of interconnected short stories about growing up in an orthodox Jewish family, it begins with the protagonist, David, as a six year old travelling on a London tram with his cousin,  and ends with David and his friends watching some older boys fight Mosley's fascists in the battle of Cable Street. Both Camberton novels are excellent depicitons of working class Jewish life in pre-war London and shouldn't be missed.

These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson

There are few writers I'd rather read than Steve Erickson, but when I began These Dreams of You, I wasn't sure the author would be able to carry this one off, so new is the subject, and so filled with  overtones that have yet to be fully articulated.

But I shouldn't have worried. 

Certainly too early is better than too late or never at all? However timely, These Dreams of You might even be somewhat late when it comes to present day politics. But neither too early or too late has much bearing on the novel's urgency. If anything,  this is a more serious and complex book than Erickson's previous outing, the excellent and transgressive Zeroville.  In fact, this might be Erickson's most important book, as firmly in the cultural pocket as Leap Year, and ranking up there not only with Zeroville but his monumental Days Between Stations.

It's also a deeply a deeply troubling book. Which is as it should be.

Because These Dreams of You- the title of course comes from the Van Morrison song- reads like a dream-photograph of contemporary America, focusing as it does on the culture's anxiety-inducing  undercurrents. So it matters little that  Erickson's novel, almost four years after the fact, harbours remnants of that initial naive enthusiasm. Because this is more about what we've become as who we elected, though, as the novel attests, the two can't really be separated. 

These Dreams of You has been called the first Obama-era novel. Perhaps it is.  But it could also be called  the first pre-Occupy movement novel. Whichever, it seeks to bridge the gap between 2008 and the present. Consequently,  it addresses the disillusionment following Obama's election, which was, of course, based on hope rather than a program or a movement. At the same time, the novel attempts to keep those dreams alive even if there is little evidence that it might still be possible to do so.  To accomplish this legerdemain,  Erickson, as he has done so often before, delves into myths that bubble  under the surface of a nation teetering on the edge of a precipice. Myths we're  all suckers for,  if not victims of,  even if they contain no more than a kernel of truth. 

Moving from  L.A. to London, Paris, Berlin and Addis Abada, Erickson's novel views race as central to the culture, whether by virtue of the man who occupies the White House,  through the music that has created  the culture or Sheba, the protagonist's four-year old, adopted Ethiopian daugther.  In doing so, Erickson embraces the dialectics of living in a post-race world (Van: "Ray Charles was shot down/but he got up to do his best").  All the time realizing that such an admirable a notion was probably premature, a false promise that, while heightening the debate, has revealed some ugly remnants that would destroy the body politic.  

What I've always liked about Erickson is how his books are able to mix fact and fiction, reality and dream, subject and object. With overlapping narratives, the setting might move in time and place, but the specifics are always clear. Though not the only protagonist, the book revolves around Zan, a former novelist and pirate radio deejay, who looks on helplessly as the country as well as his life goes into economic free fall, and the world suddenly becomes evermore dangerous and inhospitable. Soon all he  has left is his family, a handful of dreams and memories, such as election night, 2008, which he compares with RFK's 1968 political campaign. Though Zan's house is about to be repossessed, his bank account is practically non-existent,  and his family about to be split apart, he manages to do what he can to salvage the situation, and maybe even find a sliver of hope for the future.

Of course, most are just a step away from being in Zan's situation. No wonder all such dreams have been deferred, if not, for some, extinguished. Says Erickson,  "...never has a president been heard so differently by so many, but what everyone now holds in common is what they don't hear anymore, which was his music that once so mesmerized them and now seems to have gone silent."  But isn't that the logical result of creating a facsimile of a movement? So what was once in the air- be it the radio waves that emanate from Zan's adopted daughter or his pirate radio program which played tracks from various cultures- has been silenced or made negligible. But despite his loss, Zan, in his craving for the music and what was once possible, pursues meaning in a country that, despite his love for it, is on the verge of destroying him.

But These Dreams of You raises another question: that  it's those who voted for the president as much as the president, who have changed, having succumbed to a flat-screen reality in the same way the president has succumbed to realpolitik and Wall Street. Proving that his campaign was simply an attractive advertising campaign in which someone appeared to be speaking truth to power.  As Van said in the song, "you said I was the one who had to reap what you did sow." But perhaps that goes with the territory. As These Dream of You illustrates, to move beyond that requires  a Sisyphus-like task that entails pushing a political boulder which more often than not moves backwards if it moves at all.

These are only a few  of the issues raised by Erickson in what is, finally,  a political novel that purposely refuses to offer a political analysis. But that should only be troublesome to those who don't believe the trite but true saying about the personal being  political and the political being personal. It hardly matters that Erickson's analysis veers off-track, or skirts various issues. Because These Dreams of You is less about down-in-the-dirt politics than the state of a nation in which there exists a thin line between dream and nightmare, and too much emphasis is placed on the singer and the song, when what really matters is the music, and where that music comes from. 

Perhaps, Erickson is right: "failed writers should be something other than presidents."

Which is to say that along with Russell Banks' Lost Memory of Skin (which I'll write about at a later date), These Dreams of You is, for me,  the year's most important and provocative novel about the state of contemporary America.

The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Critcism by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards

In 1996, when my first book, Pulp Culture, appeared, there seemed to be just a handful of books on the subject of noir film and fiction. These days it's   impossible to keep up with them all. But Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards' The Maltese Touch of Evil- Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Dartmouth College Press) seems to be one of those books that shouts out  to be read. Mostly comprised of entries from the authors' podcast, Out of the Past, The Maltese Touch of Evil- the title denotes the book's inherent playfulness and the manner in which one film noir feeds another- deconstructs images and scenes in order to construct, however tentatively, an aesthetics of noir. Despite the book's academic tendencies, the project turns out to be an on-going, even populist, affair. 

Not content  to stay within the confines of the traditional noir critique- the  template of which must still be, on the one hand, Silver and Ward's Film Noir Encyclopedia, and on the other, Borde and Chaumeton's Panorama of Film Noir- Clute and Edwards, by combining the historical and the analytical, attach their dark city sails to the Oulipo movement. A literary workshop based in France whose texts are defined by either mathematical or lexiconical constraint, Oulipo can list amongst it  practitioners Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau and, of course, George Perec. The latter not only wrote the screenplay for Alain Corneau's almost-successful 1979 film Serie Noir, based on Jim Thompson's Hell of a Woman, but penned the widely read Oulipian text, La Disposition (A Void), a crime novel written that does not use the letter e. Thus no mere, no pere, no crime, no accent grave, and, of course, no George Perec. Likewise, Clute and Edwards seek a comparable methodology, one that allows them to step back from the usual approach, and, in doing so, makes their criticism anything but impersonal.

Through such constraint Clute and Edwards would call our attention to the constraints made on the genre. Though I've never been fond of the cliche that freedom can only be found through constraint,  the golden age of noir was definitely created under those conditions, whether regarding the production code, directorial and studio demands, film aesthetics, cinematography and history. And those can be broken down into a set of further constraints- lighting, set design, writing conditions,  and the script itself, which has its own set of constraints with which to contend. You don't exactly  have to reach for your Oulipo to realize such was the case. On the other hand, the imposition of constraints and artificially creating them, Oulipo-style, are two entirely different things which, in turn,  necessarily create different sets of possibilities.  

No doubt about it, The Maltese Touch...  works well within its  circumscribed area. More an anthology in reel time, it's comprised of 102  entries- here called  noiremes- that range from the opening shot in  Sunset Boulevard to the foggy ending of Gun Crazy and the significance of the two cigarettes in an ashtray below the words The End in The Big Sleep. In between snippets derive from some thirty films, including  Out of the Past, Sunset Blvd, The Killers, Touch of Evil, The Hitch-Hiker, Kiss Me Deadly, D.O.A.. In reviewing those moments, Clute and Edwards are quick to point out that film noir is a self-critical and self-referential genre, representing what the Oulipians call potential criticism and plagiarism by anticipation, terms that denote their multi-directional movement in time as well as cinematic space. With cultural and cinematic critiques integral to these films, templates emerge which display an array of subjects and signifiers, traumatic as well as subversive, political as well as cultural.   

The perceptions embedded in these  takes are for the most part incisive, though they occasionally arc in the opposite direction; for instance, maintaining The Set-Up's real time reminds the viewer that time is running out for the protagonist; or that the explosion at the beginning Touch of Each denotes that film noir as a genre is being blown to bits. On the other hand, its comments on the cultural history behind Chinatown, Siodmak's grim assessment of post-war America in The Killers, the image of the staircase in Sunset Blvd, the lighting in The Postman Always Rings Twice, are bound to be  thought provoking. Personally I would have liked a wider selection of films-  Fallen Angel, The Big Combo, Raw Deal, On Dangerous Ground, Devil Thumbs a Ride- rather than It's a Wonderful Life, On the Waterfront and Good Night And Good-Luck, which,  though they contain elements of noir, lay outside the genre. Equally, I thought the first few chapters went to greater lengths than necessary to explain the book's Oulipian roots and methodology. But that could be because I was never quite sure to what extent their self-imposed constraints informed their perceptions. Though the authors list a series of self-constraints, that list hardly exceeds the demands any good editor might make. Of course, editors, in this context, and however necessary, could also be regarded as a constraint. 

As a footnote,  I read The Maltese Touch... at the same time as David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 years. Consequently, I was unable to stop  thinking about film noir  in terms of debt, which, in turn, might another  example of constraint, as well as plagiarism of anticipation. After all, debt pretty much defines film noir's sub-text,  in terms of subject as well as style, with its concentration on  relationships reduced to  monetary value, manifested by heists, loan sharks, contract killings, corruption, gambling, prison (the debt one owes to society). Moreover, such debts are not only financial, but social and historical. Then there's  the literal debt owed to studios, actors, technicians and box office receipts. All of which illustrates that, despite, or because of, its limitations, The Maltese Touch... will make any  noir afficianado consider the wider implications of such films. So, even with the plethora of books on the subject, The Maltese Touch... is about to be placed on my bookshelf alongside such favorites as Silver and Ward's Film Noir Encyclopedia, Gerald Horne's  Class Struggle in Hollywood 1930-1950,  McCarthy and Flynn's King of the Bs, Nicolas Christoper's Somewhere In the Night and Michael Naremore's More Than Night. After all, this is one of those books that, after reading it,  you're not only going to want more, but you're going to find yourself thinking so much about these films that you'll immediately want to see them all yet again. Which can't be a bad thing, and says a lot for the provocative nature of the book.

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.