Book Review

By Derryll White

Burke, James Lee (2024).  Clete.

                  “Louisiana is a state of mind.”  – James Lee Burke

‘Clete’ has a different rhythm from the other Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke. That is understandable as it is Clete’s story and he is telling it. I know that there are a lot of Burke readers who have been waiting a long time for this particular story.

Clete is the other half of “the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”  He has been the go-to companion, friend and touchstone for Dave Robicheaux through mayhem and alcoholic blackouts reaching back to the Vietnam war days. The two have shared a lot of water under the many bridges of Louisiana.

Clete is a walking advertisement for PTSD. His thoughts and his actions can never take him far enough to escape the haunting and dreadful memories of his time as a Marine in Vietnam. In order to survive he has learned to act first and contemplate consequences much later, if at all. His actions are often larger than life, such as driving a stolen cement truck into the living room of someone threatening him, parking it and letting it discharge its full load of concrete onto the floors.

Clete sees this as a suitable retaliatory measure.

Clete also loves Louisiana and won’t leave. Every time he tries he gets lonely and miscues. One notable consequence was causing a plane full of gangsters to fly into a Montana mountainside.  He always comes home again. Dave Robicheaux said a love affair with Louisiana is like falling in love with the Great Whore of Babylon. Clete replied, yeah, but what a party.

The story starts at a car wash and Clete never does quite get clean. But he takes the reader for a hell of a ride in his pink Cadillac.

********

Excerpts from the novel:

SHITSVILLE -When you come home from a war, you don’t get a free pass.  The same images hide in your head until you go to sleep.  Here’s the strip of film that gets loose behind your eyes.  A column strung out on a night trail, the rain pattering on everybody’s poncho and steel pot, the foliage dripping, green and dark and hot, heat lightning racing through the clouds without sound, then somebody on point snaps a trip wire and detonates a 105 dud.  The explosion is like a sliver of glass in your eardrum.  Somebody is yelling his guts out on the ground, and somebody else is yelling for a corpsman.  Then you hear the droning of helicopters or the malarial buzzing of mosquitoes in your blood or the Gatling guns rattling or a door gunner strafing a rice paddy in a free-fire zone, all these things at once, all the sounds interchangeable, and when you awake you go immediately to the icebox, your hand shaking on the first bottle you can pull out.

ROBICHEAUX – I’ll tell you this about Dave, though.  Hed worried about my drinking but he never fussed at me.  He might ask me to take him to a meeting, trying to get me into the building, but that was as far as it went.  No matter what I did, he never made me feel bad about myself.  That’s why I always believed in Dave Robicheaux.  He was the knight errant and I was the grunt.  I told him that once.  He said that if he ever heard me denigrate myself again, he would throw me off the drawbridge at Burke Street.

NEW ORLEANS – New Orleans has a violent history, all the way back to its founding in the eighteenth century.  In 1811 the biggest slave uprising in American history took place outside New Orleans and was put down by mass murder and decapitation.  The man who led the uprising, the son of a white man, had his hands chopped off in a barn, then his thighs were shot one at a time, then his tormentors piled straw on him and burned him alive.  There’s not a lot of talk about that in our tourist brochures.

AGE – She was in a better mood now, and it made me happy when she smiled instead of frowning.  It’s funny how you change when you get older, huh?  You want to stay on the sunny side and not let anyone steal the day from you.

OUR WORLD – I did not trust the era I lived in, nor did I want to live in it.  The twentieth century had been the most violent in human history.  The amount of killing had no precedent, and I had the feeling it was about to get started again, and once more by those who had never gone to war but gloated over the graves they spread through a neocolonial world.  If I had to go to war again, I’d like to do it against those bastards.

POLITICS – We were dealing with a handful of people.  Only one of them had real power, and that was Lauren Bow, and that was because he had money.  But real power lies in government and politics.  So far the only political move Lauren Bow had made was with a group called the New Rising.  In my lifetime I had seen numerous groups come and go.  Their names change, but their membership remains the same – people who feel they have been left out.  They blame immigrants and women and gay people and Jews and Blacks and anyone else they can pick on.  Needless to say, most of them are not bright and get chewed up and spat out by the rich people who exploit them.

– 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