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James Sallis is my secret vice
Book Review
By Derryll White
Sallis, James (2005). Drive.
“We season our garlic with food.”
           “Fine’s a town I don’t even visit any more.”
James Sallis is my secret vice. Nobody I know reads him, or has even heard of him. I think they are somehow all lesser people because of that. His writing has been described as “essential noir existentialism.” Anyone who grew up reading Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, as I did, will agree with that description of Sallis. AS a writer he is lean, mean and incredibly powerful – think William S. Burroughs and Cormac McCarthy.
This is a story of honour, personal honour and how it is lived out. It is hard, the language and images crisp and harsh. Driver, the main character, has a simple code – keep your word and honour those who are true to you. Sallis is not kind to those in the story who break this code.
James Sallis writes the L.A. that has progressed from Raymond Chandler (But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither famished nor afraid.) to James Ellroy (Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.). Dirty, gritty, pulsing with poverty and nobleness, it is not a city most people see. He finds beauty there in a brutal honesty that Driver presents. We are who we are, and that is what we must be true to. I love the writing of James Sallis,
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Excerpts from the novel:
MUSIC – The jukebox belted out your basic Hispanic home boy music, guitar and banjo sex to saying how it’s always been, accordion fluttering open and closed like the heart’s own chambers.
MOBILE – He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time. He favoured older apartment complexes where parking lots were cracked and stained with oil, where when the guy a few doors down played his music too loud you weren’t about to complain, where frequently tenants loaded up in the middle of the night and rode off never to be heard from again. Even cops didn’t like coming into such places.
STATE OF THE NATION – “You hate everything.”
“I take exception, sir. A gross misrepresentation. While it may be true that I possess a distaste for such offal as the American political systems, Hollywood movies, New York publishing, our last half-dozen Presidents, every movie made in the last ten years excepting those of the Coen brothers, newspapers, talk radio, American cars, the music industry, media hype, the latest hot thing –”
“Quite a catalogue.”
“—for many things in life I’ve an appreciation approaching reverence. This bottle of wine. For instance, the weather in L.A. Or the food to follow.”
AMERICA – “Hell of a country,” Nino said, “hell of a country. Anything’s possible, anything at all.”
Well, yeah. You had family, connections, money sure it was. Little difference between this and the political machines that spat out all those Kennedys and kept the like of Mayor Daley in office. Or the ones that chocked Reagan and a couple of Bushes under the wheels of the republic while tires got changed.
– 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.
