Gobsmacked by art: James Lee Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown

Every now and then, a work of art, or part of one, hits me so hard and so perfectly that I feel it almost like a punch to the solar plexus.  I have to sit down, close my eyes, and wait for my mental breath to return.  I generally don't share those moments with others, both because they sound like so much hyperbole and because what works for me may not touch the next person.  I've decided, though, to start honoring those works when they hit me, because, hey, it's the least I can do by way of payback.

James Lee Burke is, as long-time readers know, one of my favorite writers.  For my money, he's one of the best writers working in English.  Period.  

The Tin Roof Blowdown is not his most recent book; far from it.  It appeared in 2007, so I've waited a long time to read it.  The reason is that this is his post-Katrina book, and I expected to be powerful--and powerfully unsettling, particularly because I adore New Orleans.  It was.  I loved the book, but it was also at least as disturbing as I expected it to be.  I was reading it in Cleveland while at Bouchercon, nibbling slowly at it as if it were the last meal I might ever get.  John Connolly mentioned it as proof that a writer can deliver works of genius at any age.  

I obviously recommend it highly.  

What made me put it down, stretch out on the bed, close my eyes, and need more air was a passage near the end, a section in the voice of Burke's most enduring character and one of the greatest characters in the history of detective fiction, maybe all fiction, Dave Robicheaux.  At the risk of stretching the limits of fair use, I'm going to reproduce a fair chunk of that passage here.  

New Orleans was a song that went under the waves. Sometimes in my dreams I see a city beneath the sea.  In it, green-painted iron streetcars made in the year 1910 still lumber down the neutral ground through the Garden District, past block upon block of Victorian and antebellum homes, past the windmill palms and the gigantic live oaks, past guesthouses and the outdoor cafes and art deco restaurants whose scrolled purple and pink and green neon burn in the mist like smoke from marker grenades.

Every hotel on Canal still features an orchestra on the roof, where people dance under the stars and convince one another that the mildness of the season is eternal and was created especially for them. In the distance, Lake Pontchartrain is wine-dark, flanged with palm trees, and pelicans skim above the chop, the rides at the waterside amusement park glowing whitely against the sky. Irving Fazola is playing at the Famous Door and Pete Fountain at his own joint off Bourbon. Jackson Square is a medieval plaza where jugglers, mimes, string bands, and unicyclists with umbrellas strapped on top of their heads perform in front of St. Louis Cathedral.  No one is concerned with clocks.  The city is as sybaritic as it is religious. Even death becomes an excuse for celebration.

Perhaps the city has found its permanence inside its own demise, like Atlantis, trapped forever under the waves, the sun never harsh, filtered through the green tint of the ocean so that neither rust nor moth nor decay ever touches its face.  

That's the dream that I have.  But the reality is otherwise. Category 5 hurricanes don't take prisoners and the sow that eats its farrow doesn't surrender self-interest in the cause of mercy. 

New Orleans was systematically destroyed and that destruction began in the early 1980s with the deliberate reduction by half of federal funding to the city and the simultaneous introduction of crack cocaine into the welfare projects. The failure to repair the levees before Katrina and the abandonment of tens of thousands of people to their fate in the aftermath have causes that I'll let others sort out. But in my view the irrevocable fact remains that we saw an American city turned into Baghdad on the southern rim of the United States. If we have a precedent in our history for what happened in New Orleans, it's lost on me.

I don't know how that hit you, but, damn, it gobsmacked me.  

The thing about writing rules

is that they're made to be broken. No set of rules that works for one writer will work perfectly for another. Most writers will break their own rules when it feels right.

I've been thinking about this topic a lot since I read the Guardian piece I mentioned in my blog the other day. What has lingered most with me is a contradictory pair of feelings: Just about everything every writer said is worth considering, and just about everything every writer said is worth ignoring. More the former than the latter, but still, both apply.

For example, Elmore Leonard warned against adverbs and opening with weather, both solid pieces of advice. Consider, though, this beginning to a novel:

"The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary."

and this one, from a later book by the same author:

"The sky had gone black at sunset, and the storm had churned inland from the Gulf and drenched New Iberia and littered East Main with leaves and tree branches from the long canopy of oaks that covered the street from the old brick post office to the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at the edge of town."

Both open with weather. The first uses an adverb. Despite, that, both are gorgeous, and I'd read this author all day.

Of course, I do read this author every chance I get: these are the words of James Lee Burke, who for my money is one of the most amazing writers and stylists working in English today. The first is the opening line of The Neon Rain, the book in which Burke introduced Dave Robicheaux. The second is from a later Robicheaux novel, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.

In the interest of fairness to Elmore Leonard (who, I must note, is an amazing writer who knows more about writing than I ever will), I have cheated a bit here. He specifically said not to go on too long with weather, and he also said there are exceptions. Burke wove action into the first line of Neon Rain, and a great bit of business occurs in the third line of Electric Mist. Burke is also clearly an exception.

Still, my main point remains true: Each of us should consider all of these rules and then choose the ones that make sense to us.

Except, of course, the one about writing, putting butt in chair. That one, we should all follow.

A movie gem

Last night, we watched In the Electric Mist on DVD, the only (legal) way you can catch this film in the U.S. As its IMBD entry implies (and further online research confirmed), this movie never played in theaters here. It went straight to DVD, as many films do.

Most of the direct-to-DVD movies I've watched deserved that fate.

This one does not.

I highly recommend you pick it up at Amazon or your own favorite source of DVDs and give it a look.

The movie is an adaptation of James Lee Burke's novel, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead. It follows Burke's best-known character, Detective Dave Robicheaux, through a complex plot that links two sets of crimes, one current and one decades old.

Burke's prose at its best is lyrical, magical, evocative, and powerful. For my money, when he's at the top of his game he's as good as anyone writing in English today. Period.

As I watched this movie, each scene captured perfectly for me the way I'd imagined the setting while reading the book. Tommy Lee Jones flawlessly portrayed the nobility, strength, fragility, and underlying deep rage of Robicheaux.

Don't miss this one.