Such Great Heights

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Aug 3, 2010

Dennis Tafoya didn't plan on being a crime novelist. So it's a bit funny that The Wolves of Fairmount Park (Minotaur, June 22) carries the subtitle it does, emblazoned right there on the cover: "A Crime Novel." Earlier this year, in an interview with former CP Editor in Chief Duane Swierczynski, Tafoya admitted that the genre label snuck up on him with his first novel. "When I wrote Dope Thief I thought I was writing a literary novel with criminals in it," he'd said. "But my agent was the one who said, 'Oh, no, this is a crime novel.'"

Tafoya's second book shows his comfort with the label. It opens with a (literal) bang and a quick shuffle of perspectives, and where Dope Thief arranged itself into a shaggy character study, Wolves displays the muscles of a tight plot and careful construction.

It's also a much better novel. This is, in part, because Tafoya embraces the mechanics of his genre, but more importantly, he has figured out how to command and sustain attention and atmosphere — which has little to do with subject matter and everything to do with the ability to create a world and implicate his readers inside it.

Wolves' world is a recognizable Philadelphia, not copied from a skyline postcard but sculpted out of neighborhoods from which you can see the skyline: Roxborough, Kensington, Spring Garden. Orlando, a junkie and the uncle of a drive-by victim, slips through the fringes of the city as he tries to figure out his nephew's story. Orlando's detailed street-level view takes in a proudly struggling city, from strange landmarks like the Divine Lorraine to an unnamed but very present Port Richmond Books. It's a city that's ragged around the edges, but clearly, identifiably, here.

Realism, of course, isn't the thing that makes a novel great, or even engaging. On the surface, Adam Langer's The Thieves of Manhattan (Spiegel & Grau, July 13) is a lighthearted heist caper played by the rules of a confidence game that rides the fence between realism and bald-faced fiction. In satirizing a desperate, dying publishing industry, Langer diagnoses the recent glut of fraudulent memoirs as a symptom of reality confusion; he peppers his Lower East Side and Brooklyn settings with both real and thinly veiled writers' scandals. But once the confidence game starts in earnest, the struggling-writer quips give way to a series of stories nested inside each other, and Thieves becomes a self-referential delight, a closed world of books and plots and libraries.

The heightened self-referentiality of Thieves, believable because of its brio and thoroughness, finds a more earnest reflection in Don Winslow's Savages (Simon & Schuster, July 13). Winslow hasn't strayed far from the border between SoCal and Baja's drug cartels; his cult-classic Power of the Dog ponderously and exhaustively laid out a saga of the border drug trade, heavy-handed in its exposition and judgment.

Savages is a different beast — no less violent, but considerably more fun. Winslow spins a yarn about two small-time pot dealers resisting a hostile cartel takeover, but he gilds the slight story with stoner tangents and Valley-girl distractions. The slowed-down, spaced-out haze of the story creeps across the pages, with sentences broken out into short free-verse lines and an infectious cadence pulling along each digression. It's almost a surprise, near the end, when Winslow spits out a scathing indictment of the society that created his characters and enables their actions — but only almost, because Winslow's woven a conscience through the book.

Tafoya, like Winslow and Langer, also works in a heightened reality. His Philadelphia story, for all the realistic grit of its settings, gets pulled and shaped by genre and plot, which shows in his missteps (like the overlong confession, which ties up too many loose ends in easy bows) as well as his homages (like Orlando's long walks through the dockside neighborhoods, echoing David Goodis' voice).

It's this heightened sense of the city that shows how much Tafoya's learned from writers like Goodis and George Pelecanos. It comes out in the way Orlando emerges as the main character from five or so competing voices, simply through the sophistication of Tafoya's characterization. He's a hard-luck case who understands himself and his addiction, and can use that self-knowledge to see through and understand other broken lives. It comes out in his use of place, where the city becomes an immersive element that soaks its way into character and plot and story, dyeing everything, if only a little. And because of that, Tafoya can create a story that couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, whose tragedies are as universal and individual as "those staggering, operatic Philadelphia murals" Orlando loves.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

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