The Old New York

“Hell’s Kitchen,” by Jeffrey Deaver, 2001

What is the hottest part of hell?  Evidently a neighborhood in New York named “Hell’s Kitchen” on the west side of Manhattan.  West of 8^th Avenue, north of 34^th Street, south of 59th.  It’s not a cooking show, it only features the cooking of buildings and people by fire. It doesn’t have some abusive British chef yelling at everyone in the streets.  In this book it is a neighborhood full of Puerto Rican gang-bangers, poverty-stricken black and Latino people, homeless gays, youth drop-in centers, alcoholic lawyers and pyromaniac crazies.  But thank god or not, it is slowly being gentrified by one of the biggest real estate developers in New York.  Sort of a ‘Trump’ like fellow ...

Light My Fire

This is genre writing by an author who has written almost 50 books.  Even Dostoevsky and Steinbeck didn’t write that many. It is like a band that releases perhaps too many albums. We are taught that there is ‘literature’ and then there is this stuff.  Thrillers, romances, westerns, mysteries, war stories, detective novels, legal conundrums, fantasy and science fiction, YA dystopias, spy narratives. Familiar, titillating, formulaic, easy to read, full of improbable heroes or heroines, but fun.  

Well, hold up there pardner…maybe, maybe not.  People love this stuff, especially those not addicted to only the ‘high culture’ version of writing. These types of books are the most popular, no doubt.  Remember, Shakespeare wrote perhaps 40 plays. Dickens wrote 15 mostly fat novels, some that were serialized week after week.  Balzac wrote a connected series of 36 novels and 12 novellas.  Balzac may have been the melodramatic genre writer of his time.  Volume is not always a crime.  So are there redeeming qualities here? 

Writers like John Grisham and Scott Turow have made legal thrillers into a respectable genre, given their books concentrate on social and political issues.  Young Adult fiction has forecast fearful dystopias like “Mazerunner,” “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent,” forecasting the dark future many young people see. Ursula LeGuinn projects progressive ideas into the future while Margaret Atwood describes a more dystopian version. 

Other genres, like the western, are dying because Louis Lamour and John Wayne are no more.  Rugged Indian killers and settlers are fading into the colonial past. Newish westerns from people like Cormac McCarthy indicate the darkness actually taking hold across the U.S. west.  Many books in the spy or war genres laud the CIA or parts of the CIA or the military, and are mostly reactionary.  Though the movie versions done for mass audiences – the Jason Bourne series originally written by rightist conspiracy writer Robert Ludlum – put the CIA partially in the shade.  Even the latest filmic version of right-wing writer Michael Crichton’s book “Jurassic Park” has become a pro-nature, pro-animal story.  It is a recreation of the Frankenstein myth for modern times, shadowing the original socialist leanings of Mary Shelley.  But now dinosaurs have replaced monsters built of body parts.

This book shows the strengths and weaknesses of the thriller genre. Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard made noir thriller’s hip.  Crime writing generally concentrates on the seamy, sleazy side of human beings and always includes lots of death and violence.  There is a reason why they call it ‘noir.’  It’s dim conservative view of ‘human nature’ shades into a dim view of society sometimes - but not always.  Hammett himself was a leftist and his book ‘Red Harvest’ can be read with a Marxist slant.  But mostly the genre focuses on the personal stories of bad or weak people who the reader can be appalled by.

Instead this particular book, Hell’s Kitchen, humanizes the people who live in the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen.  It features a tall, tough videographer who worked as a stunt man, did time in prison, carries a large handgun, was a big-shot art film director and is now a sensitive documentarian interested in the neighborhood.  He’s ‘got it all’ and is as unreal as other thriller heroes.  Later we find out he has an unlikely personal interest in the interviews he is shooting with his BetaCam.  

The ostensible ‘bad guy’ in this book turns out NOT to be the Trump-like real estate magnate, but a crazed pyromaniac who has developed his own formula for napalm.  The idea that New York real-estate developers might hire some thug to torch buildings so that they can profit slips away.  The ‘nice white lady’ who runs the Hell’s Kitchen charity-funded drop-in center is not what she seems either.  Instead the book makes non-white folks the sympathetic centers of the book – loyal people you definitely want on your side when things get tough.  One Irish gangbanger gets props too.  But the book ignores New York real estate shenanigans and the social context of why Hell’s Kitchen was what it was.  There is a bit of neighborhood history here that provides a back story, with the neighborhood coming off as a product of nature, not a creation of political economics.  I.E. this one is not an explicitly political noir but it’s human perspective is progressive.

There is a bit of ‘poverty porn’ here too, as suburbanites can peek into the hard lives of the dispossessed proletariat as if they were actually there.  But they are not. 

Genre fiction is a game of literary American roulette.  Play at your own risk!

Relevant reviews of “Divergent,” “Hunger Games,” Handmaid’s Tale,” “Future,” “Westerns,” “Monsters of the Market,” and John Grisham novels.

And I got it at the library!

Red Frog

September 2, 2018