Review

Crime Time
May 2002
Reviewer: Michael Carlson

You get the feeling sometimes that James Sallis ought to be translated from French, and if he were, he'd be winning literary awards. Ghost of a Flea, is less a crime story than an examination of Lew Griffin, the character who seems increasingly like Chester Himes, a man adrift in worlds that are not supposed to be his, unhappy no matter on which side of the fence he comes down. It's not just the fate of a black man playing Grub Street hack, which is all Lew seems to have left, since he's no longer a novelist, nor a detective. But he is torn between the harsh reality of life, as seen in crime, and the rich world of literature, which makes him more and more an anachronism in an increasingly alliterate world. So Lew quotes from the full range of world literature and music, from Henry James (on George Gissing) to Charley Patton. There are big names like Aristophanes and Cervantes, lesser ones like Kenneth Fearing, Alfred Kreymborg, or Charles Henri Ford (on Peter De Vries). In one five paragraph passage he name checks Walter De La Mare, Robert Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (twice). As one perceptive character tells Lew, "Increasingly, we seem to live our lives as allusion, reference… not directly but refracted from something else." Lew even meets James Joyce looking for Milton in a library fire. Admittedly, that last is just a dream. In case you miss the point, Sallis quotes Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, "my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard." It works because Lew's story moves in time, with episodes from different points in his life existing simultaneously, told by Lew from memory, in recollection. He reminds us of Ross MacDonald at one point, another crime writer who found the past always playing its role in the present. The stories are often told in ellipsis; what isn't said is more important than what is. And there's a huge ellipsis, whose secret is revealed, and reverberates back through the entire series, of which this is probably the last. "Life's never story shaped," says another character, but Sallis belies that contention. If he were French, Sallis' work would be regarded as a brilliant post-modern invention. As it is, he runs post-modern rings around the likes of Paul Auster, better read and walking dirtier streets. This one is memorable.

And Another View:
Reviewer: Mark Thwaite

James Sallis has been sending messages to us in code through his Lew Griffin novels for the past ten years. Messages about himself as a writer, about the writers he reads, about identity and belonging and about all the stories we tell about our life and its story and how that tale intertwines with others and their stories. His trademark (It is midnight. It is raining.), taken from Beckett's Molloy, is testament to Sallis' intelligence and learning and alludes to what he sees as being most important in his work. Beckett is surely the archetypal author of dissolution and crime, as a genre, if it is about anything more than mayhem, if it is about how, when faced with a moral crisis, in front of dissolving certainties, equilibrium is restored. Or not restored. For the best crime writers crime is incidental or emblematic.

In Ghost of a Flea Sallis has written a novel whose relationship to the crime genre is at best tangential and certainly dependent, for such a classification, on his other Griffin novels. Extremely episodic, jumping wildly from one thought to another, Flea's structure echoes Griffin's unfocused state of mind as his relationship with Deborah is quietly ending, his son David goes missing, and as pigeons in the local park are poisoned and mutilated. Sallis tests our patience here - his humanism is as touching as it has ever been here, and some of his sentences are incandescent, but plotting and narrative are, at best, loose - and Flea is really only to be recommended to those who have followed Griffin's adventures through the preceding four books. For those who do read on, a moving finale to the series follows, and, in the latter half of the book, some quite compelling writing. Sallis' books have only negligibly been about crime, their strength being in Sallis' understanding of the drama of ordinary lives, and with little really to investigate we are asked to look, along with Lew at what really is important, what really matters.