Book Review

By Derryll White

Pelecanos, George (2024).  Owning Up.

                  “Nothing is going to be all right, ever.”  –  George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos is a gifted writer, tied tightly to his Washington, D.C., territory.  He never steps far away, choosing instead to have his readers embrace his hometown. It’s difficult sometimes, the streets are busy with black and white hustlers we don’t experience much in rural Canada.

The characters Pelecanos builds, however, and their problems, are intimately familiar. He looks at the sadness, and delight, of growing old; the struggles of growing up; the challenges of living in an increasingly complex, gender and racially-tinted world.

Best of all, the author explores with several of his characters what it is to be a writer.  Clearly, he is comfortable with the mantle.  He examines the urban frontier we now live in, with its new and evolving pressures, with the diminishing of personal rights and freedoms and the rise of state control.  The storytelling is superb and the thoughts the reader is left with are slightly disturbing.  Such is life in today’s jungle.

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EXISTENCE – “But all I want in the end is to leave a mark.”

    “Can you elaborate on that?” said Rubin.

    Williams looked at Rubin and nodded.  “Sure.  I think an artist … if you all will allow me to call myself that … is hyper-aware of his mortality.  I mean, we all understand that we’re going to die someday.  But an artist spits in the face of that reality.  Fifty years from now, most likely I’ll be gone, but maybe somebody will be watching an old thing I did and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the tall brother who used to play on those shows.’  It’s like a long-dead writer whose name is on the spine of a chapter book in a library.  His name on that book … it proves that he was here.  It means he existed.  You know?”

GERMANS – “Frank’s German, y’know.”

    “Oh?”

    “You can tell by looking at him, if you’re thinking about it.  His parents are German immigrants.  Frank changed his name.  You wanna know what it was?  Franz Braun.  When the war was heating up, there was all kinds of folks hating the Germans, and not just the ones over in Europe.  American Germans as well.  Hell, anti-German sentiment is one of the reasons Prohibition came about, what with all the German breweries.  It’s why Christian Heurich is selling ice now instead of beer.  Me, I don’t hate the Germans.  At least they’re white.”

HISTORY – “When I was a kid, I got a card at the Central Public Library, which was also called the Carnegie Library, at Mount Vernon  Square.  It was the first desegregated building in the city, so I could spend a lot of time there, just reading.  I like history books, though even I knew that much of what I was reading, especially American history, was a distortion, and some of it was an outright lie.”

CHANGE – “Did it change anything?”

    “Right away?  No.  But history is a continuum.  Do you know what that means?”

    “I think so.  That all events build on each other.”

    “Close enough.  There’s no one event, it’s all one thing.  The past, the present, and then the future.  Nothing changed right away after that summer.  But those people who died defending their city and their loved ones were part of something that led to the Civil Rights Movement.  Not saying our fight ended there.  I won’t live to see the end result of the struggle.  But I know I played a part in it.”

 – 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

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