Review

Newsday.com
March 24th 2002
Reviewer: Gene Seymour

I was three and a half books into James Sallis' extraordinary sextet of novels featuring African-American detective-novelist-scholar Lew Griffin before I found out that Sallis wasn't - as I'd assumed all along - Black Like Me. Apparently I wasn't alone in this misapprehension.

Questions flew back and forth on the Internet about Sallis' racial background, with some replies asserting that he was at least partly African-American. It wasn't until the author disclosed in interviews that he was white - or, if one prefers, "nonblack" - that such speculation was put to rest.

Some could use this disclosure to scold Sallis for indulging in literary minstrelsy. You won't hear any gripes from me. I wouldn't have misperceived Sallis' racial background in the first place if I hadn't found Lew Griffin such a persuasive rendering of an intellectually supple, physically tough and emotionally wounded black man struggling to negotiate security and self-respect for himself in late 20th century New Orleans. Throughout the series of books that began in 1992 with "The Long-Legged Fly," I recognized and often shared Griffin's resentments accumulated from a lifetime of being misjudged, ignored, abused or devalued because of his color. And color was only one of the things that separated Griffin from life's mainstream. There was also his propensity for hair-trigger violence, his inviolable generosity to life's losers, his cultivated enthusiasms for food, music and French literature. And, more than anything, there was his tendency to dive deep into a bottle of whiskey and not come up for air for months, even years.

You don't necessarily have to be a person of color in America to create, much less empathize with, such an anomalous, desperately marginalized person as Griffin. And Sallis, who imposed his own Arkansas upbringing, eclectic tastes and academic credentials onto the grid of Griffin's background, is one of those people who burns brightly along the margins. His prodigious literary output includes science fiction, poetry, a translation of a Raymond Queneau novel, a history of jazz guitar and a biography of Chester Himes. He is a romantic pluralist whose prose style is a lyrical dreamscape. He thinks widely and deeply, perhaps too deeply for aficionados of genre fiction. And it won't matter to the status buffoons who patrol the nation's literary hierarchy that Sallis has so conscientiously worked to stretch the philosophical and linguistic capacities of genre fiction. As far as the mandarins are concerned, genres are ghettos, and if that's how you're being marketed, then, just as generations of black people have been told, you stay in your place and don't complain when your head whacks the glass ceiling.

Besides, even minor confusion by readers over Sallis' identity is an appropriate by-product of novels in which the very nature of Identity is being scrutinized in a world where who and what you are can too often be taken for the same thing. From "Fly" through "Moth" (1993), "Black Hornet" (1996), "Eye of the Cricket" (1997) and "Bluebottle" (1999), the books make up an informal autobiography of Griffin, starting from his days as a skip tracer, bodyguard and freelance avenging angel in the 1960s through his failed love affairs with strong, sexy women, struggles with various forms of addiction and his self-reinvention as a cult writer and literary oracle. Murders, felonies and missing persons tumble through the books like loose items in a trunk. But these books weren't for fans of the well-made mystery novel. They were stalking bigger game, evoking more profound expressions of loss and recovery, implying that there were mysteries far more shattering and revealing than who did what to whom.

With "Ghost of a Flea," the sixth and last Griffin novel, Sallis brings things to closure and, with a stunning flourish, transfigures everything that came before into an ingenious, resonant whole. This is a boon and a blessing for those who have read any or all of the previous books. But for those who haven't, it may be less than satisfying unless they're inspired to read all the novels from the start. Which wouldn't be a bad way to fill anyone's empty hours.

"Flea" more or less picks things up from "Eye of the Cricket" (to my mind, the richest and darkest book in the cycle). Griffin, now in his 50s, has once again hit the wall, this time with a harsher thud. The good news is that Alouette, the drug-addicted daughter of a former love, has cleaned herself up and is working as a social worker. The bad news is that she's being stalked and threatened by someone she can't see in the shadows. And the news gets worse. Don Walsh, Griffin's best friend with the New Orleans police, has been shot while interrupting a robbery. And Griffin's son David, an elusive, almost phantom presence throughout the series, has disappeared again from Lew's life. Another girlfriend is drifting away. And, if all that weren't enough, Griffin has suffered a stroke that, while not entirely debilitating, makes Death seem close enough to breathe its chilly breath on Griffin's back.

Some of these shattering events are resolved, not all of them neatly enough for readers wishing for the rigor of old-fashioned hard-boiled detective fiction. But as the climax proves, this isn't playing by the traditional rules. Think Paul Auster more than Elmore Leonard, Charles Johnson more than Walter Mosley, Don DeLillo more than Carl Hiassen.

No more clues, no more hints, except that there's much to savor here, as with the other books, in the wiry, elliptical and stylishly allusive Sallis style, weaving references from Pascal, Joyce, Dylan, Himes, Whitman, Robert Johnson and other spirits into the sultry mix. The joys and sorrows of the examined life are present and accounted for. All right, one hint to send you on your way: an adage from Griffin that runs like a riff figure in all the books: "Memory is a poet, not a reporter."