The Reading Experience

Jim Thompson in Vermont

If I had never read Jim Thompson, I might think that Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes (Serpent's Tail) is a neat little book, a provocative narrative of law-enforcement corruption and human depravity with satisfying doses of dark humor and an over-the-top conclusion that almost works.

But I have read Jim Thompson, and thus while reading Small Crimes I could really only register how derivative it is. A first-person narrator relates to us the story of his own dissolution from high school football star to corrupt cop and dual gambling- and drug-addict to ex-con trying to re-establish himself after serving a sentence for disfiguring, and almost killing, the local district attorney. His story includes his relationship with the local crime boss, as well as his former employer, the local sheriff, who if anything is an even bigger criminal than the crime boss himself. The narrator finds himself pursued still by the d.a., who in trying to get the mortally ill boss to implicate the narrator in his criminal operations also threatens to implicate the sheriff, and so the narrator only gets entangled further in the poisonous legacy of his past. That he won't finally escape it seems a pre-established certainty.

In its depiction of ubiquitous criminality and relentlessly sociopathic behavior, Small Crimes is a near-impersonation of such Thompson narratives as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Zeltserman does try to outdo Thompson in a couple of ways, most obviously by transferring the Thompson crime narrative to rural Vermont, where the violence and other crimes perpetrated by most of the novel's characters (including a nurse with whom the narrator briefly becomes involved, who seems to be a serial killer) seems outrageously out of place. Unfortunately, so out of place does it seem that ultimately it comes to be rather cartoonish, a flaw Thompson himself almost always avoided. The second flourish on Thompson guignol is that the narrator appears to be narrating the story from hell, his descent to which occupies the novel's final scene. This actually does seem like a device Jim Thompson might have used, but again I couldn't finally accept it here as anything more than an attempt to compete with the master in the exploitation of extremes.

In most other ways, the novel can't compete with Thompson's books. The narrator has little of the creepy understatement characteristic of Thompson's unhinged narrators. He spends way too much time trying to convince himself, and us, that he's not such a bad guy after all, and it's ultimately hard to have much feeling for him one way or another, not even as someone who deserves some sympathy because he's clearly insane, or who should be feared because he's so inherently evil. Although it isn't a paricularly long novel, it still seems padded out with perfunctory and unnecessary dialogue, while the last one-third or so of the story seems very rushed and full of implausible violence, some of it made more implausible by being reported to us indirectly rather than dramatically portrayed. The constant trouble into which the narrator gets himself seems contrived, which isn't helped by the fact that the setting, against which this action ought to be heightened, is depicted cursorily at best.

I'm less disappointed by the limitations of Small Crimes, however, than I am puzzled by the effort to mimic a writer like Jim Thompson in the first place. There is inspiration and then there is imitation. This novel seems to me clearly the latter, although much crime/detective fiction I read seems largely imitative as well. Most hard-boiled detective fiction imitates Chandler, while most "noir" crime fiction imitates Thompson (or perhaps James M. Cain). This must be why I still read Chandler and Thompson with great pleasure and admirration but find most current crime fiction pallid and secondhand. Both of these writers were creating something new. The kinds of characters, plots, and narrative voices they developed were so compelling they came to define the hard-boiled crime genre, but this has become a mixed blessing, as the genre itself struggles to step out of the shadow of these writers' influence.

In her fawning review of Small Crimes, Maureen Corrigan asserts that "Zeltserman takes up all the familiar tropes of the formula -- femmes fatales, frighteningly dysfunctional families, self-destructive drives and the death grip of the past -- and shows how infinite are the combinations that can still be played on them." That Zeltersman "takes up all the familar tropes" of the genre is certainly true, but the novel demonstrates that the "combinations" available are far from infinite. More importantly, it prompts one to ask why recombining these tropes is a worthwhile activity to begin with.

Optical Illusion

In a recent review of "two novels about Alzheimer's disease," LaVonne Neff comments that in one of them the author "convincingly sees through [the protagonist's] eyes, even though she tells his story in the third person." Here is a paragraph she quotes in illustration:

He looks around his car and tries to remember what make it is; he cannot. He opens the window to feel what month it is. It isn't a month. There aren't months. There are just happenings, a lack of signposts … . He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.

There is actually very little here that could accurately be described as being conveyed "through the eyes" of this character. Sentence one reports on an action from the outside and then offers a brief report of what's "going on inside" the character's mind. Sentence two does likewise, although in this case we are given the puzzling report that  he wants to "feel what month it is," presumably a measure of his Alzheimer's-induced confusion. The next three sentences puport to be the character's thoughts, but as in most fiction using the free indirect method ("psychological realism") they're really just the narrator's coherent formulation of what might be happening, in a fleeting, incomplete sort of way as, in this case, the character looks out the car window. Certainly nothing like these articulated statements are really being fully-formed by the character himself.

The following sentence is again straight reporting: "He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes." Indeed, this could just as easily be the perspective of someone peering in at the character through the car windows as of the character himself as he prepares to consult the map. The next sentence provides us with a piece of information that could be hovering in the back of his mind but again hardly seems to be the sort of thing the character would be thinking explicitly. It is the sort of thing the narrator would be offering as a way to fill out the scene, however. It's a summary statement, not a reflection of actual thought processes. The final sentence in this quoted passage returns to reporting what the character does.

In no way can I read this passage as an attempt to make us "see" through the character's "eyes." (Or if it is such an attempt, it certainly fails.) This would require a loosening of linguistic and rhetorical logic (as opposed to the loss of "logic" being experienced by the character) that we just don't find here. It would require the suspension of our own expectations of what "seeing" entails. I have not read either of the novels Neff is reviewing, and I could certainly imagine using cognitive anomalies such as Alzheimer's and dementia in such a way that something genuinely innovative in the application of point of view could be achieved, but from the passages quoted in the review and from the reviewer's account of the novels as a whole, it doesn't appear as if they are anything other than conventional, third-person central-consciousness narratives that happen to take cognitive impairment as a subject.

It is Neff's review itself that is most telling in its own confusion about the effects of point of view. It reflects a more general lack of attentiveness in many general-interest fiction reviews whereby the work at hand is mischaracterized as "getting inside" the minds of its characters when at best what it provides is some combination of omniscient reporting and mild inflections of those characters' perspective through by now shopworn narrative notations and manipulations of sentence length and structure ("It isn't a month. There aren't months."). It mistakes these facile and perfunctory devices for genuine exploration in point of view. And it thus reinforces the notion that what distinguishes fiction from visual forms of storytelling is primarily its ablity to delve into consciousness and reveal what it's like to "see through the character's eyes." What distinguishes fiction from other narrative forms is its existence in language, in writing, and the writing quoted by LaVonne Neff is just the same old boilerplate.