Let Us Now Praise Elizabeth Strout.

She grew up in rural Maine, largely self-taught, and when she sat down to write the novel that made her famous she swept aside all the nonsense she had picked up in school—that all of us were taught—about what literature should be; and in that simple, single courageous act, she separated the Red Sea from Dry Land. She created for herself a narrow trail that led over rocky soil even though gigantic walls of water that were being held back on either side of her slender trail by immensely powerful forces. She refused to be distracted by all the water on either side of her. She followed her trail.

It was almost as though she said to herself most novels make readers work way too hard to make sense of them and appreciate them; my novel will be effortless to read.

And it was almost as if she said to herself: Most novels do backflips to give readers a phony impression they're 'real' or that they're close to non-fiction—plenty of characters, plenty of complicated relationships, plenty of people making poor decisions that turn out poorly. Plenty of drama, in other words.

My novel? No backflips. Everything will be spare. I will refuse to run away from the notion that my novels are fiction.

By the way, that's what makes most novels so complicated. Their authors are running around like scared rabbits trying to lie their way into Heaven; almost as if they're trying to run away from the truth that their novels are fiction by compulsively fabricating a bunch of lies. As if the reader has no idea what's going on. Give me a break!

And it's almost as if she said to herself, most novels try way too hard to get readers to feel the emotions of the characters. In my novel, emotions will ooze out between the words, but the words I use will never intellectualize what the character is feeling. The reader will know what character is feeling without having to be told in so many words.

I pledge never to waste even a single word intellectualizing emotions. My novel, and the story my novel tells, will feel completely comfortable with the fact that what is being told here is a story that lives inside a novel. I will not use a single sentence to try and convince the reader it's anything else.

My novel will quietly and patiently focus on its only principal character and honor her fully; for example, I will refuse to use words to describe the settings of my stories.

The settings of my novels will be so prosaic and so well known to the reader that no one will miss it when I don't waste a single word describing the setting.

In addition, my novel will refuse to use words to describe what my characters look like. Why? Because if it's a really good story, by the end, every good reader will be able to write a police bulletin description of what my main character looks like. So why waste words on descriptions which so easily could be at variance with what the reader is imagining in her mind.

This is how My name is Lucy Barton might have taken shape in Elizabeth Strout's mind:

"I know," thought Elizabeth, "I'll have my single character be a patient in a midtown Manhattan hospital that has a famous building right outside her hospital window, The Chrysler Building."

Everybody knows what a hospital room looks like, so I won't have to waste a single word describing it. Same goes for The Chrysler Building.

My character will be named Lucy Barton. She's come from rural Maine but now lives in Manhattan, just like me.

In the story, Lucy Barton's doctor has restricted her to her hospital room for a series of "tests." The facts are purposely kept extremely vague and indefinite.

The only action that occurs is this: While she's in the hospital Lucy's mother comes to visit her. Lucy hasn't seen her mom in years.

I ask you, Dear Reader of my ExcitingWriting essays: Imagine you've been admitted to a hospital for 'tests' and you suddenly have an uninvited visitor. It's your mother who you haven't seen for years.

What happens to your emotions? Is there anything that happens from there on out that isn't heavily laden with emotion? Of course not. Emotions ooze out in the spaces between every word.

Fittingly, the novel is mostly dialogue between Lucy and her mother.

This is the novel Elizabeth Strout wrote while she was walking down a narrow rocky trail in rural Maine while on either side of her powerful forces were holding back walls of water.

It's called My Name is Lucy Barton. It's only about 180 pages short. And it's effortless to read, but don't read it too fast. You might miss something interesting.

Why do literary readers flock to "certain" fiction novels?

Years ago I stopped in at a gay country-western bar and noticed all the couples out on the dance floor knew precisely who was leading and who was following. I could tell because they were all swirling each other around so gracefully. There was not one klutz anywhere in sight.

But how does each couple know who's going to lead and who's going to follow? I asked and then answered my question with what I took to be the wisdom of the ages: Well, like everything else, they just figure it out.

I've often wondered how it is Purple Martin birds know to flock to Martin bird "hotels?" Haven't you? Or, conversely, how a Purple Martin knows to refrain from checking in at a Howard Johnson's? I'll bet it's the same wisdom of the ages at play, you dig? For worms? Much?

One could likewise ask—I often do—how do "literary types" wind up reading literary novels. And how do murder mystery fans wind up reading murder mysteries? Likewise, why is it that fans of courtroom dramas wind up reading John Grisham novels?

The wisdom of the ages, no doubt. They just figure it out.

Faithful readers of these monthly ExcitingWriting Advisory essays know these questions I'm asking started out many moons ago with a promise to read a prototypical literary novel—I nominated Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles—and compared it to John Grisham's Sycamore Row, which was my stand-in for a genre novel, in this case the courtroom drama, Grisham's mainstay.

Among the pressing questions of timely import I wanted to answer: Why did I prefer literary novels? Was I too snooty to read a John Grisham novel? (Most definitely not!) Why did I refrain from "dancing" with “certain” novels? Well, I was done with that! Your fearless ExcitingWriter ventured out on the dance floor without a dance instructor anywhere in sight.

Cut to the chase: I've read both novels and... well... they're different.

Grisham's fiction is "external." Towles' fiction is "internal."

Grisham routinely depends on general population groups to tell us who he's talking about, using phrases like "long-haired type," or "pick-up truck driver crowd," or "the white-collar crowd."

Towles draws characters that cut against the grain, characters that question typical modes of how we think of the groups people typically fall in to. He's got the scion of an extremely wealthy family, Woolly, being completely ignorant of middle-class American life. Although the novel takes place in the 1950s, Woolly has never heard of Howard Johnson's, no less the place mats they use which are maps of the United States with Howard Johnson locations marked on them. Woolly loves those place mats. He loves listening to radio and TV commercials because he grew up never having heard them.

Towles has a character by the name of Emmett whose father was a failed Nebraska farmer but who's grandfathers' on both side were extraordinarily wealthy.

He's got another character, Duchess, a young man whose father was a traveling actor (Towles calls him a "has been") who would take his son with him on the road (He does one "bit" where he acts out famous Shakespearean quotes) until he wanted to go off with a young woman and dumped Duchess off at an orphanage.

He's got a grown-person character by the name of Ulysses, a black man who always insists on traveling alone until he meets a brilliant seven-year-old boy by the name of Billy who tells him the ancient Greek myth of Ulysses and assigns him a mission of wondering the world for another four years until he finds his long-lost wife and child.

In this Amor Towles novel nobody is a typical anything. I rather like that. It cuts against the grain. It's unexpected. I find parts of Lincoln Highway hilarious; other parts, intensely entertaining.

I'll cover two other stark differences in next month's EWA: 

Grisham goes for melodrama; Towles prefers drama.

Grisham likes pageantry; Towels is adventurous.

See you next month. I'm pulling the plug on this one.

Literary Fiction Is No Pretty Picture.

If you wish to write or read a novel that in the current literary environment will be championed as an icon of literary fiction, it had better be peopled by deeply flawed and disabled characters, e,g., idiot savants, people who fall somewhere on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD—"characters who don't come off quite right" or "can't relate"), people who are doomed to be the subject of witch hunts; people who are inarticulate yet unbelievably insightful; characters who others might in passing refer to as "too good for this world."

There are so many examples I could name. Here are a few:

· Boo, the reclusive neighbor in To Kill a Mockingbird who haunts the cemetery and does benevolent acts of kindness most of which can never be traced back to him.

· Benjy, a mute, mentally disabled character in The Sound and the Fury, who has no understanding of time, cause and effect, or ordinary morality, but who "can sense things…" like, for example, the existence of evil.

· The young-adult character Woolly and the boy character Billy in Amor Towles', Lincoln Highway. Both are incredibly smart and both are oddly handicapped when it comes to making their way in the ordinary world on their own; they are both dependent on the caretaking willingness of two other characters: In the case of Woolly, Duchess; and in the case of Billy, his brother, Emmett.

· In Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, there are so many: For example, Seymour, who, while clearly modeled after a typical set of autistic child symptoms, truly "sees more" as he adopts an owl as "Trusty Friend;" Omeir who, due to his cleft pallet, is thought to be the cause of everything that goes wrong anywhere in his vicinity; also octogenarian Zeno Ninis who is never able to express his homosexual love for a British prisoner of war when they were both prisoners of war in North Korea during the Korean War, but who as an elderly man on the last day of his life lays down his life to save children who otherwise would have become victims of an active-shooter incident; by so doing, he turns himself into a hero.

In other words, literary fiction chooses to make stories out of the weak, the oppressed, the "road-kill," the brilliant yet unrecognized ones who will always be misunderstood and condemned by bullies for their weaknesses and shortcomings; the ones that the mob assembles for, and comes to collect in the middle of the night with torches blazing. Think of Frankenstein, for example. Coming back to life from the dead, is it possible Frankenstein might possess valuable insights people of ordinary intelligence and experience might not share?

I started thinking about all the novels that might be quite popular but which no one would ever think to call literary. They might contain plenty of idiosyncratic, misunderstood characters. What keeps us from thinking of John Grisham's Sycamore Row as a literary work? Well, it's genre, for one. It's a John Grisham novel—about a struggling lawyer trying to defend a last will and testament that is essentially indefensible, so that the sum and substance of the novel becomes, Just watch how he pulls this off!

While reflecting on this, I had a "vision," if you will:/p

Is it possible literary fiction desires to convert its readers into typical liberals who always root for the weak, the broken, the oppressed; those stripped of their rights; and the under-represented and under-appreciated while non-literary fiction does the opposite, converting readers to believe in the stalwart, the stout-hearted and the winners who must win again and again in best-selling novel after best-selling novel? After all, Jake Brigance (John Grisham's hero) always wins each case, right?

That's probably an oversimplification.

But think about this: At its heart, what is a literary genre all about? I say it's all about function over form in storytelling because it's driven by character; while non-literary fiction is all about form (e.g., genre) over function because it's propelled by reader expectations, for example, by a set of rules about how that genre of book must be written and must turn out in the end.

Detective mysteries, for example:

They'd better start off with a crime or there would be nothing for the detective to solve (and for we readers, too, because we as readers of the mystery love to play amateur sleuth). Detective mysteries had better end with the crime solved, or else the author will have broken the genre—gone off track. That might make an interesting literary fiction where the book starts off as a genre, but breaks the genre mid-stream, no? Or maybe it would simply be confusing to readers who expect one kind of entertainment and then wind up reading another.

Any thoughts?

Here's my theory of the day. And I'm sticking to it until the sun sets.

There are two kinds of novelists, the ones who like to point out how we're all alike, and the ones who like to point out how we're all different.

John Grisham definitely gets a kick out of showing us how we're all part of one herd called the human herd. In his novel, Sycamore Row, he predicates the appeal of his novel based on an all-out courtroom battle waged by relatives of a newly deceased multi-millionaire businessman who are determined to inherit his estate.

It's unfortunate that the wealthy character whose name is Seth Hubbard, didn't leave his estate to them in the latest version of his will which he wrote and dated the day before he died.

Seth's relatives, the relatively normal, upper-middle class, educated white Southerners, soon learn that they're about to inherit nothing.

The story revolves around their indignation and disappointment when they learn the single person who will be inheriting Seth Hubbard's entire estate is Seth Hubbard's former housekeeper, Lettie Lang.

If you've read John Grisham novels, you know many of them take place in the rural South, in a fictional place called Clanton, Mississippi. And I'll bet you can already guess that this former housekeeper who's about to inherit Seth Hubbard's entire estate is African-American. Don't be surprised when the white residents of Clanton get all bent out of shape by the prospect of having an African-American multimillionaire living among them.

Setting aside for a moment the well documented mores and customs of the rural South, I wonder why anyone would want to sign up to read a novel about relatively well-off white people motivated by greed acting badly. But you see? That's the appeal of reading a novelist who actively wants to posit that all people have the capacity to act equally as badly when visions of inherited sugarplums are yanked away just before they appear.

John Grisham relishes dramatizing a family that's about to take part in a "legal brawl" in hopes of inheriting millions. That's what you get reading an author who loves to point out how we're all alike. When I look at the human race as I think Grisham does, I have to admit, maybe we are alike: We're limited. We're ignorant. We're deficient. We fall short. We fail. We fight until we forget what we've been fighting for.

Now posit that kind of novel against the opposite kind where the author loves to point out how we're all different, let's say for the sake of argument, Anthony Doerr's Cloud Atlas or Amor Towel's Lincoln Highway. Although many would call both novels literary—and maybe they are—with every page we read in those stories, we find the characters themselves turning, by which I mean they're either revealing themselves or maturing, or at least changing as people before our eyes which gives those authors trmendous opportunity to have us as readers feel wonder, surprise or a sense of adventure with every turn of the page.

Well, that's my theory. When you start with human limitation (we're all alike) as your moral construct, the world looks like a far more bleak and colorless place. Sure there are entertaining high jinks. Sure there's courtroom drama. But I'd opt for wonder, surprise or adventure any day, wouldn't you?

Next month: More about Sycamore Row—what works and what doesn't

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The Magic of Amor Towles

If fiction at its best is, as one famous novelist once wrote, a continuous fictive dream, I nominate Amor Towles, most recently author of Lincoln Highway,as dream director extraordinaire.

It's not just that the story being told sounds like someone who is as guilty as sin trying to talk his/her way out of a traffic ticket; it's also that the events reel out one after another so inevitably, so plausibly, with a blush of childlike innocence, you want to laugh and forgive them their crazy schemes because they make us want to believe there's capacity for goodness at the core of their souls.

What I love about Lincoln Highway is this: It's literary adventure at its finest. At its heart, it's an action story with a heart; it's a stupendous one-of-a-kind adventure tale that involves the reader in pure story from the first page until the last.

The opening is notable because it's a homecoming, which usually occurs at the end of a story, so it immediately pulls you in—gives us, as readers, a new beginning, a new story to read, just as one of the characters who is being released from a juvenile detention facility, is being given a new beginning in life.

The experience of reading it? Well, it's like you jumping on a fast-moving freight train that then accelerates, pulling you along relentlessly 'til the end.

That's what I love about the book; at first it seems to take us from Nebraska to California, but then it turns and takes us magically from Nebraska to New York and reminds us of the richness of America in the 1950s when we were young and immortal and everything was possible, a time before cell phones, a time of freight trains and unbelievable wealth.

It suggested to me America's faded glory, how rich we were as a country, how rich we still are and how possible everything still is in relative terms—even in this summer of global climate change—how close we came and still could come; how great we could be again.

What Makes John Grisham's Bestselling Novels So Appealing?

Have I been avoiding reading John Grisham novels because I'm snooty, or because they're not literary enough? Or, is there some other reason? Most importantly, what have I been missing by not reading him?

That's the subject of this EWA plus the next few I'll be writing.

I'd like to understand, better than I do, why so many are attracted to reading novels by John Grisham while, by comparison, so few are attracted to reading novels by Elizabeth Strout, James McBride, Amor Towles, Marilynn Ronbinson, and Michael Chabon,just to name a few writers whose novels I've written about and whose work I've openly admired. In the case of Strout, Chabon and Robinson, I will be writing about them in the coming months.

The question is not how John Grisham is able to turn out one bestseller after another when compared to the other writers I meantioned. All of them are best-selling authors, universally admired by book reviewers. Rather, I'd like to understand why Grisham's hovels sell like hotcakes when compared to the other novelists.

This off the web: "According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 28 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy, and J.K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors who have sold two million copies on a first printing."

By comparison, Amor Towles' The Lincoln Highway, which came out in October 2021 and his previous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, published in 2019 "have collectively sold 4 million copies and have been translated into more than 30 languages."

In this EWA, let's compare and contrast the first 20 pages of Grisham's Sycamore Row to the first 20 pages of Amor Towles' The Lincoln Highway. What can we tell about the entire books just by looking at their opening pages?

The First 20 pages of Grisham's Sycamore Row.

The first chapter (6 pages) covers the apparent suicide scene of Seth Hubbard, a 70+ year old man who is found hanging from a noose that's been strung up on a Sycamore tree, with a ladder apparently kicked aside as Hubbard did away with himself.

The first chapter is written in the style of a police report—an extremely controlled, purposely non-expressive style of writing. Nothing is described that is not what it is, meaning a rope is a rope; a coiled noose is a coiled noose; a rainstorm is a rainstorm.

There is only one paragraph where the omniscient narrator (Grisham's voice) diverts from his police-report style to ask a series of questions: "Had there been an instant of doubt, of second-guessing? When his feet left the safety of the ladder, but with his hands still free, had Seth instinctively grabbed the rope above his head and fought desperately until he surrendered? No one would ever know, but it looked doubtful. Later evidence would reveal that Seth had been a man on a mission."

Chapter 2 is devoted to describing Jake Brigance awaking at 5:25 a.m., dressing, leaving home and driving to his office in the little town of Clanton, Mississippi. Jake is our star-power vehicle, the attorney-personality who ties all of Grisham's novels together. We're immediately sympathetic to the plight of this small-town Mississippi attorney who works such long hours yet earns so little yet, nevertheless, is so maligned by so many. (His house has been burned to the ground by the KKK, for example.)

We see him leaving his home, but before he leaves, he "tiptoed into Hanna's room, kissed her on the cheek and pulled the sheets up a bit higher." What a nice guy. You like Jake. You have to like the guy. Always on the side of right and justice. Who wouldn't like him?

We follow Jake while he unlocks and enters his law office in downtown Clanton, Mississippi. By then we learn Jake and his wife Carla have seriously considered moving away from Clanton, yet they haven't left.

Chapter 2 ends with this sentence: "At 7:00 a.m., on schedule, he sat behind his desk and took a sip of coffee. He looked at his calendar for the day and admitted to himself that it did not look promising or profitable."

With Chapter 3, we have Jake Brigance going through his morning mail and opening a large envelope from the same fellow, Seth Hubbard, who's suicide scene was described in chapter one. The envelope contains Hubbard's last will and testament. That brings us to the end of page 20.

After the first 20 pages, am I fascinated? Do I want to know what happens next? Yes.

It's an out-and-out mystery, you see, where you open with the crime scene, or, in this case, the suicide scene.

The first 20 pages of The Lincoln Highway.

By comparison, Amor Towles' novel opens quietly with our principal protagonist, Emmett Watson, being driven home by his prison warden, Warden Williams, after having served a non-contested manslaughter sentence in a juvenile penal institution. Never mind how unlikely that might be (A warden driving a newly released prisoner home, even if he is under-age.) We get to sit through the warden's pep-talk to Emmett about having served his time, and "paying his debt to society."

On page 5 Warden Williams delivers Emmett into the hands of a rancher, Mr. Ransome, and, less than a page later, into the hands of a banker, Mr. Obermeyer. We learn Emmett and Billy's father has passed away, and the bank is foreclosing on his farm. This scene takes place in the kitchen of the farm house.  The banker has left the electricity turned on in the house out of consideration to Emmett and Billy, with the understanding that they'll move out in a day or two.

In the rest of the opening 20 pages, we see Emmett walking the house where he grew up, knowing that although he was home now, he'll be leaving home with his brother a few days from now. We're treated to memories of the little town in Kansas where he grew up. We meet a neighbor friend, Sally, Mr. Ransome's wife, who brings tonight's dinner in the form of a casserole. Finally, on page 16, Emmett and Billy are left alone. Billy takes a stack of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in aluminum foil from his backpack; he gives his brother one and takes one for himself; and he pours two glasses of milk.

On page 18, "As Emmett smiled and took a sip of milk, he sized up his brother over the rim of the glass. He was about an inch taller and his hair was shorter…. He was happy to be sitting with him at the old kitchen table. He could tell Billy was happy to be sitting there too."

So far, it's not altogether clear what this novel will become. Then, at the end of page 20 the novel declares itself when Billy returns to his backpack and withdraws an envelope of "important papers" he had found in their now deceased father's metal box. "Billy tipped the envelope over the table and out slid nine postcards.

The last words on page 21: "They're postcards," Billy said. "To you and me. From Mom. Nearly eight years had passed since their mother had tucked the two of them in bed, kissed them goodnight…"

And the first words on page 21 are these: "…and walked out the door—and they hadn't heard a word from her since. No phone calls. No letters."

Here you have a sense, in a novel entitled The Lincoln Highway, that the young men are about to leave on a journey to explore their common past, searching for their long-lost mother. Of course, it's obvious to we readers that their mother may not want to be found.

By the time I write next month's EWA (July), I will have read one of the two novels. By the time I publish my August EWA, I will have read both.

We already know this much: Both novels are exciting mysteries. I'd like to figure out: Is my shying away from Grisham based on my shortcomings or his? I want to confront "popular taste" head on. Am I just being snooty? Or, is there something else—something genuine—that separates the 300-million seller from the 4-million seller? That question sure is something "to wrassle with," as we say in Texas.

Forbidden Desire

James McBride's writing class is now in session.

In the midst of a near riot over the distribution of free cheese in a dank basement in a housing project in South Brooklyn, the author of Deacon King Kong, sketches Potts' second visit to "The Cause." Potts an NYPD Sergeant arrives with a number of underlings and other police to investigate recent murders.

That's the surface story. The hypertext is that Potts, an Irish cop, is intensely drawn to Sister Ghee, a black resident of The Cause, yet there is only so far he can go; he's on official business, after all. Yet McBride makes no attempt to censor Pott's thoughts, and therein lies—at least for us, the readers of this brilliant novel—the sweet fruits of forbidden desire.

"Potts turned his attention to Sister Gee. Even on an early, bleak Saturday in that musty, crowded basement, she looked lovely as an Irish spring morning."

"She smiled thinly. She didn't seem happy to see him. 'Seems like you brought the whole force today,' she said."

Potts tells the other residents to speak to the other policemen while he asks Sister Gee, "'Can I speak to you outside?'"

"She followed Potts up the ramp and outside. When they were in the plaza, he turned to her, placed his hands in his pockets and frowned at the ground. She noticed he was wearing a double-breasted sergeant's jacket. He looked quite sharp, she thought, and also bothered. Finally, he looked at her."

Their dialogue—fast as lightning—reveal two people on the same wavelength:

"I will not say I told you so."

"Good."

"But as you know, there's been an incident."

"I heard."

"All of it?"

"No, just rumors. I don't believe in rumors."

The conversation goes back and forth. At certain points Sister Gee is using Potts to find out what happened at the crime scene, and, at other points, Potts is using Sister Gee to understand the background of what actually happened.

Right after she decides that Sportcoat, the principal protagonist, was having an affair with Sister Bibb, she protects her to Potts, telling him, "Sister Bibb wouldn't hurt a fly…"

Potts says, "It's called evidence. I have to ask."

"Potts stared at her. That smile, he thought, is like a rainbow. He tried to keep his voice even, official."

When we readers become aware that Sister Gee has been skirting the truth, misrepresenting, she thought to her herself, "I'll keep lying, just to fold into that big shoulder and see him smile and tell a joke in that heavy, pretty voice he got, the way he did that first day in church.

She smiled a sad, genuine one this time and felt her heart fall to earth as she said the words that brought light to his heart every time he heard them. "Come on back then. Hurry back, if you wanna…"

Potts forced himself to check his emotions. He was at work. People were dead… The best he could get out of it was standing right in front of him, as gorgeous and kind a woman as he'd ever seen.

"We better go back down lest they think we're out here ordering Chinese." He turned to head down the ramp until she touched his arm, stopping him. [They have a quick little exchange of dialogue about the murder that took place. We readers are hanging on the writer's every word, praying something will happen between the man and the woman. More than a little touch on the arm. As readers, I think it's fair to say, we're a little disappointed when nothing happens.

Then, after the cops have left, maybe it's the recent presence of Potts and his fellow cops that gives Sister Gee new insight into her situation and her neighbors and the human tragedies playing out all around her in the housing projects of South Brooklyn.

"Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before; they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise…."

"She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, they realized. She read it on their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie's mother howling at her son's coffin would haunt them…"

I'm thinking of the outrage expressed by the relatives of loved ones lost to the domestic terrorist/racist who struck just the Saturday before last at the supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. To a person all the deceased were victims of a hate-crime, just as Beanie was.

The moment of insight James McBride is describing continues: "…all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within the sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man's dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugar-cane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white power."

The lesson is over. James McBride has just taught us how to make forbidden desire a part of an official investigation that solves nothing yet leaves us feeling achingly sad.