Exercise in damage imitation
By Marilyn Stasio |
October 14, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WRITERS who pay homage to their literary deities by imitating their idiosyncratic voices and distinctive styles usually end up looking like kids playing dress-up in their parents' clothes. Which makes the stunt Ariel S Winter pulls off in "The Twenty-Year Death" - three loosely linked but self-contained novels set in consecutive decades and written in the manner of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson - all the more extraordinary.
The overarching design doesn't come completely into focus until the final novel, but the first strokes are drawn in "Malniveau Prison" when Winter casually introduces two secondary characters - the hot-tempered, hard-drinking American author Shem Rosenkrantz and his delicate, much younger French wife, Clotilde-ma-Fleur. The couple will become increasingly prominent as the meta-story develops.
Set in a small town in France in 1931, the novel is written in a contemplative narrative voice that keenly evokes Simenon and features a watchful detective with the air of Inspector Maigret. A torrential spring rain predictably greets Chief Inspector Pelleter of the Central Police when he arrives in town at the request of an incarcerated killer who informs him that inmates have been mysteriously disappearing from the prison.
The crimes in this story are more lurid than anything Maigret ever faced, but the tone of desolation is remarkably faithful to its illustrious model - an achievement that proves more elusive in the second novel.
"The Falling Star," set in Hollywood in 1941, owes its cynical perspective to the novel's alienated narrator, a private eye cast in the mold of Raymond Chandler's archetypal noir hero, Philip Marlowe. An honorable man in a dishonorable profession, Dennis Foster has a code of ethics that distinguishes him from unsavory clients like the movie mogul who hires him to keep tabs on an unstable star - that same fragile French beauty, now known as Chloe Rose, first glimpsed in "Malniveau Prison."
Winter, a first-time novelist whose genre savvy may owe something to his bookseller background, has a fine eye for the precision of Chandler's descriptive prose, and the haphazard nature of his plotting. But Winter's characters are merely sleazy rather than steeped in moral rot. And while Foster talks tough, he lacks the bitter eloquence of Chandler's postwar knight.
Back on high ground in the final installment, "Police at the Funeral," Winter channels Jim Thompson in the harrowing first-person narrative of a desperate man driven to violence as he slips deeper into madness. Shem Rosenkrantz, the belligerent American author who first appeared in "Malniveau Prison" and dropped a few career notches as a hack screenwriter in "The Falling Star," sinks even lower here. With his movie star wife confined to a private clinic after a nervous breakdown, this deadbeat louse is living off the earnings of the prostitute he's been pimping out to the mobster who holds his gambling debts.
Shem loses what's left of his mind in an alcoholic fantasy about murdering his way out of his troubles. "Killing someone was a whole lot like writing," he reasons.
All three novels are beautifully built and sturdy enough to stand on their own. But there's something seductive, even a little sinister, about Winter's grand conceptual design of recurring faces and interlocking themes - like some glittering spider web that catches the eye of an admiring fly.
The overarching design doesn't come completely into focus until the final novel, but the first strokes are drawn in "Malniveau Prison" when Winter casually introduces two secondary characters - the hot-tempered, hard-drinking American author Shem Rosenkrantz and his delicate, much younger French wife, Clotilde-ma-Fleur. The couple will become increasingly prominent as the meta-story develops.
Set in a small town in France in 1931, the novel is written in a contemplative narrative voice that keenly evokes Simenon and features a watchful detective with the air of Inspector Maigret. A torrential spring rain predictably greets Chief Inspector Pelleter of the Central Police when he arrives in town at the request of an incarcerated killer who informs him that inmates have been mysteriously disappearing from the prison.
The crimes in this story are more lurid than anything Maigret ever faced, but the tone of desolation is remarkably faithful to its illustrious model - an achievement that proves more elusive in the second novel.
"The Falling Star," set in Hollywood in 1941, owes its cynical perspective to the novel's alienated narrator, a private eye cast in the mold of Raymond Chandler's archetypal noir hero, Philip Marlowe. An honorable man in a dishonorable profession, Dennis Foster has a code of ethics that distinguishes him from unsavory clients like the movie mogul who hires him to keep tabs on an unstable star - that same fragile French beauty, now known as Chloe Rose, first glimpsed in "Malniveau Prison."
Winter, a first-time novelist whose genre savvy may owe something to his bookseller background, has a fine eye for the precision of Chandler's descriptive prose, and the haphazard nature of his plotting. But Winter's characters are merely sleazy rather than steeped in moral rot. And while Foster talks tough, he lacks the bitter eloquence of Chandler's postwar knight.
Back on high ground in the final installment, "Police at the Funeral," Winter channels Jim Thompson in the harrowing first-person narrative of a desperate man driven to violence as he slips deeper into madness. Shem Rosenkrantz, the belligerent American author who first appeared in "Malniveau Prison" and dropped a few career notches as a hack screenwriter in "The Falling Star," sinks even lower here. With his movie star wife confined to a private clinic after a nervous breakdown, this deadbeat louse is living off the earnings of the prostitute he's been pimping out to the mobster who holds his gambling debts.
Shem loses what's left of his mind in an alcoholic fantasy about murdering his way out of his troubles. "Killing someone was a whole lot like writing," he reasons.
All three novels are beautifully built and sturdy enough to stand on their own. But there's something seductive, even a little sinister, about Winter's grand conceptual design of recurring faces and interlocking themes - like some glittering spider web that catches the eye of an admiring fly.
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