Catching Up #49: Train by Pete Dexter

Pete Dexter’s Train will surprise you. You keep thinking you have a handle on it, then you realize soon afterward that no, you actually have no fucking idea where this shit is going. If he wasn’t such an effortless storyteller, this would be a huge problem. For pretty much the entire second act of the novel (if any sort of three act structure can even be imposed on Train, that is), you are simply following along with characters, knowing that at some point they have to meet up again, but what exactly will become of that, who the fuck knows? And when you do finally reach the climax, guaranteed you didn’t see that shit coming, dear reader.

But like Nerd favorite Scott Phillips, though you may not know where this wild historical novel is heading, the journey is hilarious and dark enough to keep you skipping on down the road, The Wiz-style (there’s a reference we didn’t need…).

Train is the story of three characters in 1950’s L.A. who come in and out of each other’s lives in both violent and funny ways. Lionel “Train” Walk is a young black man who caddies at an all-white country club called Brookline. One day one of his totes, a cool cop named Miller Packard, takes notice of Train’s natural skill for the game. Miller Packard later comes to the rescue of Norah Rose, a victim of a brutal rape aboard her husband’s yacht. These three characters will all collide into one another’s lives in unexpected ways, ways that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling that is.

Like a Sopranos episode, Dexter seems intent on subverting the reader’s expectations at every turn. There are pay-offs and connections made, just not the ones you thought were gonna happen. Also like The Sopranos, when the violence lands in this beast, it lands fucking hard. The yacht scene is almost too much to take, the scene scars your brain like a hot poker through your temple, lingering and singeing you throughout the rest of the book.

And we need that scene to resonate because for much of the rest of the book, there’s not a whole lot of crime shit going down. Shit’s happening and a story is being told for sure, but not in some whiz-bang thriller type of way. Luckily Dexter’s character work is sharp enough, his prose clever enough, and his dialogue hilarious enough to carry you through. The attention to historical detail is pretty damned sly too (Norah’s Beverly Hills home is still being fixed after Howard Hughes plowed through it with his plane).

But what is most remarkable about Train is Dexter’s handling of race and gender issues in regards to the time and place of the novel. There is no preaching to be found in this novel, nor cloying revisionism neither. Dexter simply presents the characters and their situations in all their complexity and the rest is up to you. Well, that’s not entirely true – the handling of a certain character and his girlfriend trying to get an integrated golf course/housing development is sort of brutally satiric, but everywhere else (wow, totally subverted my own point there, but onward we go!)…

And speaking of characters, there's a minor feat in this novel that many readers may miss. Miller Packard is certainly the hinge and main draw of this novel, yet we really know very little about him. There's a few passages at the beginning and end of the novel that let us into his head somewhat, but overall what we know about him is through how other characters perceive him. This choice is very much in keeping with Packard's cool and detached demeanor and makes him all the more interesting, but few writers would allow for such ambiguity in such a major character.

So if you’re up for a dark, funny period novel that raises challenging gender and racial issues and defie expectations, Pete Dexter’s Train ought to float your boat…or steam-power your train (sometimes you write something so lame that it just has to stay in the draft – Gene Shalit has jack-shit on me).

Ruminating In My Pants #3: The Crime-Centered Art-House-Thriller/Crime-Centered-Literary-Thriller

When perusing the newspaper for movie listings (oh print, you silly antiquated thing, you) for movie times, rare is the instance when you find a noir/crime film to attend. Hell, for that matter you barely even find action movies or straight-up thrillers (and aside from last year's Fracture you almost never see a courtroom thriller anymore - remember when those were HUGE, kids?). But there is one thing you almost always find - and they are usually pretty fucking awesome - and that is what I call the Crime-Centered-Art-House-Thriller or CCAHT.

These are much like the Crime-Centered-Literary-Thrillers you find in the New York Times Book Review every week, only in movie form (wow, that is some redudant shit right there. I apparently think that you, dear reader, are an idiot). Patron authors of these are such critical darlings as Russell Banks, Pete Dexter, Richard Price, James Carlos Blake, James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy,and now noir fan fave Dennis Lehane has recently joined the ranks.

These authors write dark, masculine, violent stories that would make any crime fan get a boner, but they manage not to be lumped in with the critically poo-poo-ed "genre writers" simply because they often center their stories around historical events. Basically, you take a crime novel and sprinkle a J. Edgar Hoover here, a dash of Jesse James there, package it in a classy cover and voila! you have a crime novel fit for yuppie consumption.

I'm a big fan of that stuff too and when I'm not reading stuff for the blog, I've generally got my acne-scarred nose in one of their many books because non-fiction frightens me unless it is about filmmaking (Ebert's new book on Scorsese is awesome, but could use some stills or production photos at the very least, by the way.). But the film equivalent of this literature phenomenon works a bit differently, it seems.

Films that I would qualify as part of the CCAHT genre from recent years would be ones such as Shotgun Stories, No Country For Old Men, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The King, Zodiac, In Bruges, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, In The Bedroom, Snow Angels, Transsiberian, and Eastern Promises.

Most of these films feature big stars and have heavy talent behind the camera, and a large number of them are also adapted from CCLTs as well, but they often find themselves strictly screened at your local Landmark Theatre (and unless you live in a major metropolitan area, you're SO-fucking-L until it's available on Netflix). CCAHTs also pop up frequently at the Academy Awards and on the major critics' top ten lists, much like the CCLTs often garner similar awards and critical notices in the book world.

Unlike the CCLTs, CCAHTs don't have to always be historical to be considered part of the pack. Mainly, they have to not just be violent, but explore the nature of violence and blah-blah-bullshit-blah. This is where I roll my eyes until the retinas detach. With both CCLTs and CCAHTs there seems to be this idea that they have higher-minded goals than crime/noir fiction. While this is sometimes true, it is more often not the case.

Can you honestly claim that a Pelecanos novel explores violence any less probingly than The Darling by Russell Banks? Or that Before The Devil Knows You're Dead has more grandeur and tragedy than the goings-on of The Grifters? The answer is no, in case you're wondering.

You can even do the flipside with this argument too. Is the violence any less exciting and lurid in Dexter's Train than it is in Swierczynski's Severance Package? Is No Country For Old Men not as visceral and gory as the Coens's earlier effort, Blood Simple? For answer, see above paragraph.

We do need labels to some extent because, well, shit needs to be marketed. That is obviously what labels and genres and markets and demographics all come down to: reaching the appropriate audience. But I don't see the point of giving these labels and genres "worth," making one or the other greater than/less than. After all, as far as movies go, unless you see the movies mentioned above which are packaged ever so high-mindedly, you're not really catching any decent crime shit at all. Those are practically all there is for crime nerds anymore!

But for books, I'd lat least ike to see more endcaps at Barnes & Noble where some of the CCLT writers are lumped in with folks like Pelecanos, Guthrie, Bruen, and Huston. Somebody's gotta bridge the gap, and since publisher's aren't about to do it, it's apparently up to booksellers and library employees. Well, those folks and certain brilliant bloggers with too much time on their hands.