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Also this issue: Eye Candy Marcel Marceau Art in Northern Liberties Rambleshoe Macbeth |
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March 20-26, 2003
books
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George Pelecanos’ previous work is his own toughest judge.
There are several scales on which to weigh a writer and a book. You can evaluate a novel by literary merit or by sheer enjoyment; you can measure it against examples of its genre or as a unique performance; you can scrutinize its relationship with the outside world or restrict yourself to the words between the covers. Sometimes the harshest measure of a writer’s performance, though, is when he is measured against himself.
In the case of George P. Pelecanos' latest, this last makes for the hardest test. And Soul Circus, disappointingly, falls a little short. Over the course of nearly a dozen novels, Pelecanos has built a reputation as one of our best crime writers, with sales figures that peg him somewhere past cult status, but nowhere near the bestseller racks. Pelecanos' justified reputation is due partly to his mastery of and willingness to flout the conventions of the genre; partly also to his development of an intimate and detailed range of settings and characters within the urban jungle of Washington, D.C.; and partly to an amoral and occasionally violent, but always controlled, sense of cool.
With Soul Circus, though, Pelecanos seems finally to have lost his cool. The simultaneous release of his previous novel, Hell to Pay, in paperback, underscores Soul Circus' desperation. Hell to Pay is rock-solid genre fiction -- while it's nowhere near the inspiration of his earlier novels, like the masterful The Big Blowdown or the loping and asymmetrical A Firing Offense, the novel effortlessly shows off Pelecanos' realistic, rounded, thoroughly human characters and his full-force ghetto realism. As with Richard Price's Clockers, it's obvious that the writer has done his research, insinuating himself in all levels of D.C. society. Hell to Pay does not look to transcend the crime genre, but even proceeding by rote, Pelecanos creates a benchmark example of the form.
It is in its aspirations to something greater that Soul Circus falls flat. The two novels show an increasing concern with the problem of gun violence, but the undercurrent of protest in the earlier book becomes a primary agenda in the latter. Their plots are directly linked -- Pelecanos opens Soul Circus some months after the close of Hell to Pay, picking up the case of a secondary character. But the secondary plot of Soul Circus reads like a replay of the previous novel: a similar case of gang warfare and drug rivalry, with similarly bloody results. The latter book differs only in its more intense focus; little ink is spared on the characters' lives outside of the main plot, and Pelecanos' tone becomes considerably more moralizing. The shades of gray and moral uncertainty characteristic of Pelecanos' best work give way to a preacher's zeal.
In Soul Circus, Pelecanos spends a great deal of time telling rather than showing, as he reintroduces and develops character, setting and plot. Soul Circus is the third of his books to feature Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, a black-and-white team of private investigators, and one of the constant problems with writing series fiction comes from the need to provide context for readers unfamiliar with previous installments. Pelecanos normally does this subtly, allowing connections between characters, history and background to emerge through action and incidental conversation. In Soul Circus, though, that work is done directly, through narration, as if the subtlety of his ordinary approach might be missed. The result becomes a book more concerned with setting forth the elements of character and situation quickly and unequivocally, as if for a larger and less demanding audience.
These elements of protest and economy lend Soul Circus a feeling of righteous anger, and the closing scene, which unites Strange with Nick Stefanos, the hero of Pelecanos' first novel, even strikes an elegiac note. The conviction and the righteousness in Soul Circus is new, and even praiseworthy -- Pelecanos moves toward a diagnosis of the problems of the inner city he writes about so well. But the agenda underneath the plot exacts a heavy price, removing the ambiguities and the incidental touches that elevate much of Pelecanos' back catalog. Soul Circus is a fine crime novel, certainly, and stands up against almost anything else in the genre. Measured against himself, though, Pelecanos' performance falls just a little below par.
George Pelecanos reads Fri., March 21, 7:30 p.m., free, Barnes & Noble, 720 Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 610-520-0355.
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