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Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

Actual tragedy is tough to pull off. Not because sadness is so rare — the sheer number of addiction and abuse memoirs attest that it's not — but because tragedy, at least in the classical sense, has some very exacting demands. Tragedy is difficult because the story's conclusion is already there, so that a writer cannot depend on surprise or the onrushing pull of events to carry the reader along. This is because the structure of the thing — real tragedy, with earned catharsis — does not come from an act of God or emerge out of the blue, but rather from a human fault. It is always already present, and shows through each individual moment of the plot and in all of the hero's actions.

This always-already-presence — much more than a handful of freshman-English bullet points, like the unities of time and place — keeps the story of Augustus Rose, the hero of Glen Duncan's harrowingA Day and a Night and a Day (Ecco, Jan. 6), from pure classical tragedy. But Duncan confronts the challenges of tragedy squarely, beginning with an orthodox in media resand unspooling the details of his character study carefully, parsimoniously; Duncan keeps a clear eye calculating each scene, intensifying the impact of his slow reveal of a horror we already know is there, not in Augustus' character but in the situation that traps him.

In this, Duncan is helped immensely by the news, as Augustus' story is heavily topical. The book runs down a list of hot-button topics, with a multiracial hero caught acting as a terrorist and interrogated in a third-country prison. Escaping mere polemic topicality through hard work, Duncan finds the delicate balance between the terror of the interrogation room and the love story that places Augustus in it. His story gains strength from the clear divide, in tone and style as well as event, between passion and terror.

For all of Duncan's delicate balancing, the tragic dimension of A Day and a Night and a Day does not come out of that divide, or from Augustus' character. Instead, Duncan's tragedy occurs in the theater of interrogation. The best work he does comes in the scenes of torture, in discussions between Augustus and his tormentor, Harper. These scenes, the talkiest part of an already-talky book, cast the situation of extreme rendition as a national, cultural failing, not a personal fault.

Harper and Augustus, after all, get along well, or would were their situation different. But only Harper, clean and corporate and dressed for a casual Friday, can divorce himself from the situation to enjoy their rapport, and the horror is less that his violence happens, or that he enjoys it — it does, and he doesn't — but that Harper gets to see it as clinical and functional and morally inconsequential, merely a matter of definitions and tactics.

Duncan's tragedy may have been ripped from the headlines, but is clearly a novel; his writing is smart and dense and often beautiful. Dan Baum's equally tragic Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans (Spiegel & Grau, Feb. 17), quieter and blunter, weaves together actual headlines. Baum's book is novelistic nonfiction, and he's worked to make it read less like the series of New Yorker articles it grew from and more like a chain of interconnected short stories.

Because of this structure, and because Baum's gifts are so clearly those of a reporter rather than a novelist, the book runs a heavy risk of being mechanical, composed of nine characters who carefully cross-section a city's populations, whose stories proceed in isolated vignettes that begin to connect into cohesive through-lines only halfway through the book.

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Of course, when those stories connect, they show a neglected, divided city; and when they're forced to converge, it's entirely due to Katrina, as if the only thing able to touch all corners of New Orleans was a thing able to destroy it. But, like Duncan does, Baum identifies his tragedy precisely, and shows that New Orleans' fall comes not from outside — Katrina's no judgment on Mardi Gras immorality — but from the breakdown in human, moral response.

One of the storm's central heroes, in Baum's telling, is transsexual bartender Joann Guidos, who kept her tavern open through and after the storm, providing a refuge for neighbors and journalists; the sucker punch in her story comes not when the power goes out, but when she's forced to desert her bar at gunpoint days after the storm, in compliance with evacuation orders.

New Orleans, both in Baum's telling and in the third-anniversary headlines last fall, is working to move away from a story of a botched, functional, corporate response, and toward a story of individual and collective rebirth. Baum's coda emphasizes this — those characters who return to the city become emblems of more than persistence or renovation as they work to renew and correct the city's divisions. Duncan makes a similar gesture, planting the seeds of Augustus' redemption in the denoument. Both writers, even as they mark out national tragedies, work hard to end on a hopeful note, locating the beginnings of change in destruction.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)