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Something for everyone here
Book Review
By Derryll White
Lehane, Dennis (2006). Coronado.
The reason I like Dennis Lehane as a writer is embedded in these stories.
There is a hopelessness of possibilities that is balanced by his success as a writer. The characters are fucked up, lost and without direction but are imbued with abounding personal power. It is clear that there isn’t much hope for a future, but the reader knows that out of the limited possibilities presented Lehane has built a career as a strong, insightful storyteller.
I am not saying that these stories are autobiographical, but there is a strong sense that the passion and violence contained here could certainly have been mine and I am willing to bet that much of it has hooks into Lehane’s past. It is very personal.
Those of us fortunate enough to have shared a past with a character like Jewel Lust will always remember that passion, that need to seize life and wring out all the experience. Many of us will also have a character like Blue somewhere, lost in our psyche and coming out now and again to remind us of choices made.
I liked this work. It reminded me of motorcycles and freedom, and the ugliness and beauty of growing up a man, trying to find one’s own way in a hard, hard world. I think there is something for everyone here.
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Excerpts from the novel-
INFATUATION – Elgin liked that about her, the way she let him know he was still just a man after all, and would always take himself too seriously, part of his nature. Letting him know she might be around to keep him appraised of that fact every time he did. Keep him from pushing a bullet into the breech of a thirty-ought-six, slamming the bolt home, firing into the flank of some wild dog.
WAR – …it took him a while to get over Mae, to get over the loss of something he’d always expected to have, the sound of her laugh and an image of her stepping naked from Cooper’s Lake, her pale flesh beaded with water, having been the thing that got Elgin through the jungle, through the heat, through the ticking of his own death he’d heard in his ears every night he’d been over there.
LIFE – There was something about Jewel Lust that sank into men’s flesh the way heat did. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, had a beautiful body, moved in a loose, languid way that made you picture her naked no matter what she was wearing. No, there was more to it. Jewel, never the brightest girl in town and not even the most charming, had something in her eyes that none of the women Elgin ever met had; it was a capacity for living, for taking moments – no matter how small or inconsequential – and squeezing every last thing you could out of them.
DESTINY – And I wonder what the fuck’s going to become of me. I wonder what I’m supposed to do now. Got me a useless truck and a useless high school diploma. I should be like my parents were in the 1949 picture, all smiling and hopeful and shit. But I ain’t. What’s waiting for me out there, out past the dark and the whole of Texas, ain’t nothing I’m looking forward to.
HUMAN CONDITION – (Bobby’s father) “You think anything’s changed since we fucking cave-painted? They suck our dicks so we’ll go to sleep. They share our beds so we’ll keep them warm. They fuck us so we’ll pay the electric. And if they suck our dicks and share our beds and fuck us just right, they know we’ll buy them earrings and cars and fucking gym memberships. Because they can be alone, but they can’t survive. And we can survive but we can’t stand to be alone. And that’s it.”
(Bobby) “That’s it?”
(Bobby’s father) “We hunt, they eat. We build, they dwell. We produce, they use.”
(Bobby) “That’s my inheritance, the sum of my received knowledge from you?”
– 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.