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Small
Town 
by
Lawrence Block
We've
been a big fan of Lawrence Block in the past (see
mystery list) and find him to be as prolific and solid a writer as there
is in the mystery genre. He can be gritty as hell, best demonstrated
in his Matthew Scudder series, and flippant and fun as in his Bernie
Rhodenbarr burglar books. His dialog always rings true to the ear
and he seems to bring enthusiasm,
believability, humor and aplomb to each successive literary effort. Therefore when we heard he
had written an
erotic thriller, his
"big New York City novel", we were eager to get our hands
on it. Unfortunately for us, we finally did so in audio book form,
choosing to take it with us on a long car trip as our sole source of
listening entertainment to help bide the vast expanses of a desert
road trip.
First a warning that if you had planned on reading the book
yourself, you should stop reading this immediately. We certainly
don't want to take any money out of Mr. Block's pockets, for one
thing, and furthermore, the issues we have with the book may well be
our own and we wouldn't feel great about discouraging others from
exploring the novel themselves lest it prove
enlightening to them in some way. And at 448 pages, there is much to
explore. Block himself calls it his most ambitious work
yet and it is a story told from multiple view points and with
several different storylines that intersect, the idea being that
even though New York is a notoriously big impersonal metropolis, the
human interactions within the five boroughs make it really just a small world, small
place, small town. That sort of thing. Especially post 9-11, when the book is set, and
when New Yorkers understandably found themselves reaching out to
each other as never before.
Small Town shows great promise initially and begins in true Block
style with the mysterious strangling death of a woman by a killer
that seems to be taking advantage of a cleaning person's rounds by
doing his dirty work in a way that has the poor schlep scrubbing away
the evidence just before discovering the bodies. Block introduces a wide
array of rich characters right out of the gates, the former police commissioner, a lawyer,
a writer, an art gallery owner, some detectives, and various other
NYC denizens and seems primed to use the killer to drag them
all together as we, and they, struggle to solve the case.
Unfortunately however, Block then proceeds to solve the case for us almost
immediately and place all his attention instead on the sex lives of the people
involved.
The killer, called The Carpenter by the media due to his
penchant
for using common building tools in his crimes, is supposed to be a
grieving elderly gentleman who lost his wife and children to the
9-11 tragedy and has decided in the aftermath that the random killing of
other New Yorkers
is his calling to help ease the city's pain. The Carpenter's whole death
and rebirth philosophy and the explanations of how he loves the city
so much that he must sacrifice more people as some sort of cleansing
is as implausible as it was hard to listen to. Why a retired
insurance agent or whatever he is, no matter how aggrieved he might
be, would decide to randomly fire bomb gay night clubs, bludgeon
prostitutes with framing hammers, and strangle real estate agents is never satisfactorily
explained. And as every aficionado of the genre knows, even, and in
fact, especially, the psychos and lunatics that carry out the heinous
crimes within the pages, need to be believable on some level and have their psychosis,
whatever it is, make some semblance of sense. It would have been even
worse if we would have been made to wait until the end of the book
for this supposed explanation of the Carpenter's actions which is, perhaps, why Block
chose to get it out of the way early.
The writer character, the one initially accused of the first murder,
is supposed to be interesting because he was drunk and doesn't
really remember whether he strangled the women or not. He could
have, he seems to think, and ends up benefiting greatly from the
murder charge when his books immediately become valuable due to his
infamous status. Not a bad character all around but there is this fetish you see, a small blue rabbit,
found to be missing from the dead woman's apartment and even though the cops
come and completely search the writer's cramped studio looking for it, he
somehow later finds
it prominently displayed within his sock drawer. Block however has included a
previous scene where the Carpenter is depicted carrying the animal around
in his pocket debating whether to place it at other crime scenes so we must assume, once the writer has subsequently
found the
object within his dwelling,
that the Carpenter is interested in framing the writer, or at least
has infiltrated his living space and perhaps plans to return to some grisly
end. He never does however, and inexplicably the rabbit's presence is never explained at all.
In fact, Block seems to have forgotten all together the rabbit's
history and that it was in the Carpenter's possession at one point.
Too leave such a supposed key element of the story unresolved is
unforgivable.
The explanation for the lapse however is possibly that Block gets so
caught up in the erotic aspect of his book that he completely
forgets to wrap up the mystery. And don't give us any crap about how
us regular folk
out here in Iowa can't stomach a little erotic with our thriller.
The thing is that we at least need to have a little thrill in our thriller as well. When the art gallery owner, Susan
Pomerance, begins piercing her organs, masturbating left and right, hot waxing, giving
public blow jobs, talking men into sucking each other's penises,
shackling wrists, strapping on apparatii in order to anally
penetrate various
acquaintances, and supposedly using sex as her own form of art to
splash around the city, she begins to take over the book as if her
libido was it's only important message. She is portrayed as some sort of liberated succubus
that forces men to give in to their secret fantasies and reevaluate
their whole lives based on the fact that an attractive woman is
willing to focus her entire essence on her sexual self and has
decided to act out every kinky whim that crosses her mind. While this may or may
not be interesting or earth shattering depending on one's personal
experiences and while we typically would steer clear of ad hominem attacks that question a man's right to
share his fantasies, the
whole thing comes off as completely self indulgent writing that wreaks of
either repression and unfulfilled dreams or a lack of any grasp of what
is really going on out there and the effect it would likely have on
real people. All the men in the book that come in contact with
Susan are supposedly so completely mesmerized by her willingness to
toss boundaries aside, pierce her nipples and hot wax her pubic
area, that they immediately abandon their regular lives and lose all
concentration just at the thought of seeing her one night a week. So what? Pierced nipples?
Pubic waxings. In most major cities you can't swing a cat without
having it catch a claw on a nipple ring. Hell there is enough of
that sort of stuff in rural Arizona these days to make it laughable
that similar behavior among the heavy hitters ensconced in the Manhattan art scene would be the
substance on which to hang the plot of a huge book. Especially one supposedly
addressing the haunting after effects of 9-11.
By the time the Carpenter is finally caught (as he sails aimlessly
around the harbor lobbing small Molotov cocktails in vessels along
the waterfront on September 6th or 7th of the next year, to no described
effect by the way), and caught
incidentally by the ex police commissioner
who has been stripped nude, effectively exposing his willingness to be waxed
himself (a fact which the Carpenter briefly puzzles over) it would have
to be called egregiously anti climatic if the plot had in any way held
together up until that point. By this time however, we could care
less what happens to the Carpenter, the depilated commissioner, the orifice
plunging art dealer, or
the city of New York itself at least in the context of this book. Block seems to be
saying that the net effect of S-Eleven was that people are still out wandering
around behaving as irrationally and self indulgently as before
except that some now have less body hair and others have been
senselessly killed. The only theory that holds any water to explain
this is that perhaps Block himself was so traumatized by
the events befalling his beloved city that he has realigned his priorities and
intends to address unfulfilled sexual fantasies now that he sees how
fleeting life can be.
In any event all is not lost in the effort as Small Town has some great descriptions
of various NYC neighborhoods, offers some entertaining insight into the
publishing business and colorfully describes other uniquely New York
experiences to the point where the city itself becomes the most
interesting part of the read. Not surprisingly, the characters that
ring the most true are the cops and bartenders and alcoholic private
detectives that fill the minor roles and leave the reader longing
for Mr. Block to get back to what he does best which is spinning out
good, solid mysteries. It's not that we begrudge the writer for
branching out and experimenting with new material but this latest
effort is akin to
when Michael Jordan quit the NBA to pursue a baseball career. We
didn't blame him for it and may have even admired him for giving it
a shot but we
were sure glad when he finally donned that Bulls uniform again. Hopefully
the next time we encounter Mr. Block he'll be exploring the challenges
facing Matthew Scudder's sobriety or Mrs. Rhodenbarr's favorite son's
kleptomania and not further chronicling the adventures of Ms.
Pomerance as she decides that taking large runny craps on the bare waxed
backs of her shackled seductees somehow makes for titillating reading.
As an
after note it should be mentioned that the reader of the Audio Book
George Guidall is excellent and almost succeeds at making the words
he has been given to work with plausible and gripping.
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