Writing fiction is no excuse for getting away from truth. If anything, the fiction writer’s burden to render believable stories about relatable people is greater than that of any other.
James Lee Burke puts on display the calamity that occurs when one forgets this, with The Tin Roof Blowdown, the 16th in a series of novels about cowboy cop Dave Robicheaux: a story about the Iberia, Louisiana, detective tracking down a street thief who’s also running from the mafia kingpin he robbed and the guilty conscience he incurred by raping a girl long before. All set in the context of Hurricane Katrina.
It’s a story whose protagonist is at once an omniscient narrator and a mundane character in the middle of a vast, intersecting plot, who knows more information than he in reality could, and details and thoughts and histories of other characters that do not seem plausible. And it is told with so many embarrassing solecisms and inconsistencies, and with such tired didactics on race relations and local and federal politics, that its essence does not strike credibility.
Above all due to the contradictions in the characters, over whom the narrator, despite the author’s apparent intentions, has no honorable insight. So that they move and talk and think not of their own volition, but only as Burke wishes they do, leaving no room to be empathized (let alone sympathized) with, neither his cops nor his criminals.
Which is to say: Burke’s sheriffs and bail bondsmen, his mafia kingpins and street thieves, are not at all real people—they are composed not of the clay of real life or the blood of the human heart, but, instead, out of literary workshops and the author’s own fancy. Their thoughts are irreconcilable with their acts, their dialogue is incongruent with their vocations, their conflicts and contradictions are wholly untenable.
The protagonist is evidence.
Detective Robicheaux, whom Burke’s faithful readers know well by now, is pleaded to be a tough man with a hummingbird’s heart and the residual demons of his former alcoholism. Yet, while he searches out perpetrators through the streets of New Orleans, his ways are like those of bullies and professional wrestlers, figures who try to appear tougher than they in actuality are. Robicheaux picks and chooses for whom he’ll have compassion (as if some people are human and others are not), and his domestic affairs do not in the least bit resemble those of men with past drinking crises.
Of course that is all fine for that culture of casual readers who look to be neither entertained nor moved but simply occupied, so as to pass time. They will no doubt buy and like this book.
But in all truthfulness the story is told with inexact jokes, imprecise dialects and diction that is frequently off. Burke’s literary devices possess neither zip nor any sign of mastery. With this story he is much like a baseball pitcher who doesn’t have his control, who didn’t bring his stuff.
The book could have been either half or twice as long and it would have made no difference. There is not a sole redeeming sentence in the entire 367 pages of the story.
If Burke ever had reason for praise, it does not appear in The Tin Roof Blowdown, and that’s about all that needs to be said, because this book, in reality, doesn’t warrant a word more.
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The Tin Roof Blowdown
James Lee Burke
*
Simon and Schuster, $26