Book Review

By Derryll White

Burke, James Lee (1994). Dixie City Jam.

“The only power he has is what we allow our fear to give him.”  –  Dave Robicheaux

James Lee Burke is a writer that one cannot get enough of.  He is still writing and his early material is just as strong, just as devouring, as his new.  My wife, clouded and dying from brain cancer, used to love listening to me read the Robicheaux novels to her. “He writes of misery and brutality, but he grows beautiful flowers of love and peace in my mind.  He’s really a poet,” she said. That was a long time ago but I still think she cut to the core of Burke’s story-telling.  He is an amazingly accomplished writer who describes a world that is still real to some of us.

‘Dixie City Jam’ is a dance between good and evil. Not many, and certainly not myself, can meaningfully define those concepts. Like Michaelangelo, Burke paints them viscerally, in words.  The reader gets, beneath the poetic images, a sense of these competing constructs of the world we inhabit.  Without conscience one shudders at what the bad guys wreak on a distant, but known, world.

What Dave Robicheaux does, what drives his actions, is cloaked in mystery, sometimes beyond understanding, but the reader is left with the certainty that there are forces extant that repel the bad.  It may not be something the reader can intuit, but there is a visceral sense that Dave is a bulwark against the darkness.

His stalwart partner, Clete Purcell, is as crazy and as loyal to Dave as the hells of Vietnam can forge a man to be. Clete’s craziness, without bounds or rules, is always directed toward supporting that unknown power that keeps most of us cushioned and alive.  The American pantheon of writers doesn’t get any better than James Lee Burke.

********

Excerpts from the novel:

THE FRENCH QUARTER – Morning was always the best time to walk in the Quarter.  The streets were still deep in shadow, and the water from the previous night’s rain leaked from the wood shutters down the pastel sides of the buildings, and you could smell coffee and fresh-baked bread in the small grocery stores and the dank, cool odour of wild spearmint and old brick in the passageways.  Every scrolled-iron balcony along the street seemed overgrown with a tangle of potted roses, bougainvillea, azaleas, and flaming hibiscus, and the moment could be so perfect that you felt you had stepped inside an Utrillo painting.

But it wasn’t all a poem.  There was another reality there, too: the smell of urine in doorways, left nightly by the homeless and the psychotic, and the broken fragments of tiny ten-dollar cocaine vials that glinted in the gutters like rats’ teeth.

LOVE – Lupus, the red wolf, lived in her blood and waited only for a slip in her medication to resume feeding on her organs and connective tissue.  And if the wolf was not loosed by an imbalance in the combinations of medicine that she took, another even more insidious enemy was temporary psychosis that was like an excursion onto an airless piece of moonscape where only she lived.

She was supposed to avoid the sun, too.  But I had long since given up trying to take her out of the garden or force her back into the shade of the cabin when we were out on the salt.  I had come to feel, as many people do when they live with a stricken wife or husband, that the tyranny of love can be as destructive as that of disease.

COMMITMENT – I left him there, a good man out of sync with the world, the era, even the vocabulary of his countrymen.  But I doubted if anyone would ever be able to accuse the Reverend Oswald Flat of mediocrity.  His kind ended on crosses, forever the excoriated enemies of the obsequious.  To him my words of caution bordered on insult and my most reasoned argument had the viability of a moth attempting to mold and shape a flame.

PSYCHOLOGY – If you have ever been in psychoanalysis or analytically oriented therapy, you’re aware that the exploration of one’s own unconscious can be an intriguing pursuit.  It is also self-inflating, grandiose, and endless, and often has the same practical value as meditating upon one’s genitalia.

VIOLENCE – I sincerely believe that we’re attracted to films about the Mafia because the violence and evil portrayed in them seem to have an explanation and a beginning and an end.  It’s confined to one group of people, who in their fictional portrayal even have tragic proportions, and we’re made to believe the problem is not endemic to the species.

But I think the reality is otherwise.

********

“The word death is never abstract.”   – James Lee Burke.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

Article Share