Saturday, December 23, 2017

Review: Since We Fell

Since We Fell Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

OK, bad news out of the way to start:

First, this is so contrived in so many places that, as well written as it generally is, it won’t survive your putting too much weight on it. [SPOILERS] Why would a con-man go to incredibly elaborate lengths to persuade his wife he’s another man if, as he repeatedly claims, he’s doing so to help cure her of her agoraphobia and panic attacks? Why, if he’s planning an intricate international scam in order to acquire the wealth he dreamed of as a working-class kid, does he have the resources to purchase and outfit multiple safe houses? And why, if he’s trying to earn her eventual trust, does he stage an event in which she believes she’s murdered him?

Why, I can’t help asking now that it’s over, didn’t he just go into it over a nice bottle of wine?

Second, tough-guy Lehane has gone soft on us. The guy behind the brilliant Mystic River and the exemplary noir short story collection Coronado has come to believe in love. [SPOILER] Sure, he has a young woman murdered in front of her newborn, but the point is that even people who’ve screwed one another over can share the sort of love that augurs a happy-ever-after and a new family all their own.

I can’t say such a softening of one of our best pros is all that surprising – the disappointing Live By Night (made into the Ben Affleck movie) showed he was willing to sell out at the right price – but for much of this one I’d hoped we’d see a return to form of the earlier novels.

That’s two major strikes against this but, that said, it’s otherwise as terrific as I can imagine. Lehane is still such a pro, so capable of drawing compelling characters and of exploring a noir universe, that it works in spite of its foundational flaws.

One character, who’s holding a gun to our protagonist Rachel’s head, asks her, “Do you want to be good, or do you want to live?” There may be subtler and more satisfying distillations of the noir premise, but there aren’t any more direct. Everything in life is tarnished; any time we make it through the day, we diminish ourselves through the compromises we make.

Rachel’s afflictions, her inability to deal with strangers, are a consequence of the evils she’s seen as a journalist and as a woman raised by a possessive, overbearing mother. She’s been bruised at every turn, and she determines she doesn’t want to bruise anyone else. She doesn’t even want to be with Brian, in large part because she doesn’t seem to believe she’s worthy of him. (In turn, he seems drawn to her because she represents an unsullied decency that’s beyond him. He’s drawn far less well than she is, though, and since Lehane gives him exceptional chameleon powers, it’s hard to get a real read on him.)

The different sections of this one don’t line up all that well, but Lehane makes each one sing. The first section is an almost stand-alone story about Rachel trying to identify her father. It’s beautifully done, worthy of Lehane’s deep talent, and it succeeds in making historiography – the search for history as opposed to history itself – compelling. The second, when she falls in love with Brian, has a nice resonance as well, suggesting an intriguing version on the old “Gaslight” trope where a husband tries slowly to convince his wife she’s insane.

The next parts of the novel move well – I really enjoyed the tension – but they ultimately strain credulity. They work only as long as Lehane distracts us from their silliness, which he is talented enough to do until, with the book over, not even he can keep us from looking back and asking, “wha?”

I’ve touted Lehane as the exemplar of contemporary noir, the closest thing to a supplanter James Ellroy has known. Well, Ellroy may have slipped a little (he’s recycling his own excellent work, which means something like Perfidia still stands above most of what’s out there), but Lehane has slipped farther. I’m likely to keep reading him (though not the Live By Night sequels – avoid those) but without quite the great expectations he earned with his early work.


View all my reviews

No comments:

Post a Comment