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Bluebottle |
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| Bluebottle by James Sallis Walker Publishing Company Inc. (USA) Fitzhenry & Whiteside (Canada) 161 pages, November 2000 ISBN 0802775950 Reviewed by Diane Gotfryd I am afraid to read this book again. It would be like trying to repeat a dream, impossible to have the same wondrous experience. Luckily, the book has been revisiting me since I read it a few weeks ago. Brief snatches of dialogue and scenes have been my company while I wait for a green light or walk down a long corridor. Because of the excellence of the writing, the unusual story, the intimate characterization and its lingering impression, I have selected Bluebottle for my best reviewed book of 2000. Private detective Lewis Griffin has had something bad happen to him. He’s in a New Orleans hospital. As Lewis fades in and out of a coma, so do we. This is a stark experience, a very intimate mortality. ". . . connections between myself and the world were faltering, as though tiny men with hatchets hacked away at cables linking us, cables that carried information, images, energy, power. The world, what I could see of it, had contracted to a round tunnel, through which I sighted. On the rim, just out of sight, images sparked and fell away into darkness. Beautiful in the way only lost things can be. Then darkness closed its hand." Recovering slowly, regaining his lost sight, Lewis has fragments of memory about the shooting that nearly killed him. The thin hum of mystery in this book derives from his work to solve the puzzle. It is interesting that he is hired to do so, and otherwise might not have bothered. As we read, it is apparent that Lewis sees a bigger picture, including how a black man lives in the South just a few years after the civil rights movement. "No way I was going to get into that roadhouse during regular hours, of course, no way I was going to get through the front door at all. Back door and ten in the morning might be a different thing. Our whole lives get handed back and forth through back doors." How Lewis recovers, what he chooses to do and not do, are the main points of this novel. And like a reunion, many people from his past resurface. His mother, who maintains a strict schedule to impose order on her world, flies to see him for the first time in years. "She might just as well have crossed Ethopia on camelback" Lewis thinks, astonished. Having lost his apartment lease, he moves in with his true love LaVerne, a smart and broken hearted call girl. "How do we ever know what to do, Lew? Where things will lead? What’s best?" she asks him. LaVerne might have been Lew’s salvation, in a different book. Sallis hones in on exactly the right thing to spend time describing. In a run down trailer home, interviewing a witness, Lew is invited to sit. "I sank into, decidedly not onto, the couch. It was covered by a throw, a fits-all dark paisley cloth reminiscent of bedspreads, full of folds and creases like time itself. Things cellophane- and crackerlike crinkled and crackled under me. I peered at her through my own peaked knees as through a gunsight." We experience an ongoing time warp through the book as Lew moves between memory and future. We also leap into our own lives when the author, speaking through Lew, reminds us we are reading a book: "Chekhov insists that once a story is written we cross out the end and beginning, since that’s where we do most of our lying. What you have here, then, is all middle: all back and fill, my effort to reconstruct the year missing from my life, to hold on to it." James Sallis is a new author to me, although his writing, editing and translating credits reach back to the 1970’s. It is evident in Bluebottle that an experienced, confident writer is at work, and probably has had perfect control of the manuscript from keyboard to press. There are no jarring notes or inserted explanatory dialogue to mar what is an unusually seamless story. Looking back through Bluebottle for quotes, I found myself reading pages and pages. It is an irresistible book. Buy a few copies and give them to those hard-to-buy-for people on your list: your boss, your father, the person you just started dating, the aunt who only reads non-fiction. Oh, yes, and keep a copy for yourself. |
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