my review of Lou Berney's November Road from last week's Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald...
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In the second week of November 1963 Frank Guidry, army veteran, charmer and skillful lieutenant of
New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello is given an unusual assignment: go all the way to Dallas and leave a getaway car in an underground garage for another one of Marcello’s men.
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Assuming it’s a bank job or something Guidry thinks nothing of it and leaves town. A few days later back in the Big Easy Guidry hears about JFK’s assassination in a club and immediately figures out what’s going on. Marcello’s pathological hatred of Bobby Kennedy has got the better of him and he’s organized a hit on the President of the United States. People connected with the hit start turning up dead and Guidry, realizing he’ll be next, flees for his life.
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Meanwhile Charlotte Roy has made the impulsive decision to leave her alcoholic husband and start a new chapter in California. She grabs her two young daughters and heads west out of dreary Oklahoma City along Route 66.
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Back in New Orleans Marcello puts a sinister hitman named Barone on Guidry’s tale. Barone, we discover, is terrifying and brutally competent at what he does.
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When Charlotte’s car breaks down Frank realizes that traveling as a family man is perfect cover so he manoeuvers his way into Charlotte’s confidence. Frank and Charlotte’s emotional and physical journey together is the crux of the book.
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Lou Berney was conceived the night Kennedy was shot and he was born not far from Caddo County Oklahoma where the great crime writer Jim Thompson’s father was the disgraced Sheriff. Berney understands this terrain and these archetypes and Charlotte and Frank’s western odyssey is as perfect a representation of Mikhail Bahktin’s notion of the artistic chronotope as we are likely to see in contemporary crime fiction: geography and character and time fusing to give us a complete pictures of a broken America reeling at the end of Camelot.
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Berney has been praised as an inheritor of Elmore Leonard’s mantel and this is fair enough, but November Road lies somewhere in a more provocative territory between Don DeLillo’s Libra and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. It’s an ambitious, literary crime novel that takes seriously its characters, milieu and philosophy.
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Berney is dealing in the tropes of Americana here and he gives us an embarrassment of riches: conspiracy novel, noir thriller, western, road movie. In a recent interview Berney said that after completing November Road on time for his publisher he let the book sit for a month, re-read it and decided that the tone and characters were all wrong. He decided to scrap the whole thing and start again. In a genre where publishers pump out disposable novels to a yearly schedule and authors boast on twitter about how many words they wrote today, Berney binned and then rewrote his entire book because he wanted to give his readers his very best work.
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We are grateful. The leads are deep and three dimensional and you can see Berney’s care in the economy of the prose. No information is repeated, no dialogue is extraneous, every scene either reveals character or moves the story forward. This is twenty-first century American crime fiction at its apogee.
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In this type of novel there is only one kind of story logic and end-game that will complete the arcs of Frank, Barone and Charlotte. But while the reader is playing by the rules she or he knows Berney is Spock playing three dimensional chess. He’ll end the novel the way he needs it to end.
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Like Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Akira Kurosawa in Hidden Fortress or George Lucas at the beginning of Star Wars Berney has figured out that the story of great events can sometimes be told in a more interesting way through peripheral characters.
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Berney shares Stoppard’s erudition, Kurosawa’s cinematic eye and it’s appropriate that November Road is being adapted and directed for the screen by Lawrence Kasdan who wrote the best of the Star Wars movies: The Empire Strikes Back.
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If you are au courant with what’s trending in crime fiction, then you already own November Road and are reading this review merely to echo your feelings about the book. If you’ve never heard of this author I can only envy the enjoyable couple of weeks you have ahead of you as you buy this book and then plough through the back catalogue.
