The Best of the Backlist: Jess Walter
The Best of the Backlist
A look at worthy authors you may not know, focusing on their entire collection of in-stock backlist titles. The backlist is a great way to meet some new authors and get a sense of their work.
Jess Walter
Whenever I’ve finished one of Jess Walter’s novels, I’ve thought “how come more people don’t know about Walter?” He writes all over the board about many different subjects and can’t be pegged as a writer about only men, or only relationships. His settings and major characters are as disparate as a donut-shop operator, a post-9/11 New Yorker, a man going blind, a serial killer. Despite the crazy array of characters, his books hold together well. Indeed, he won the 2005 Edgar for best novel with Citizen Vince.
Citizen Vince gives us a Spokane, WA, donut maker, unremarkable except for the simple facts that he doesn’t act much like a donut maker. For some reason he thinks about death far too often, hangs out with the wrong crowd (his sometimes girlfriend is a professional working girl), and may on his off-time be involved in a little scam. Good citizen? Well, that’s actually Vince’s job, technically, as these minor foibles (running with drug dealers, taking a little money here and there) are really nothing compared to the big service Vince has done for his country. He is a federal witness, protected after ratting out a mobster (for big stuff, not little stuff like Vince pulls…). And as a life-long bad guy (minor version) now stuck in Podunk (Spokane, in comparison to NY), Vince finds himself for the first time on the right-side of the street, able to be a real citizen and actually vote! His amazement (and confusion) at the process and the possible ramifications provide a constant backdrop to Vince’s antics. Just what does it take to be a citizen, a good person for the community? Naturally, Vince’s freedom (and his ability to vote in the upcoming election) is jeopardized when someone figures out where he is….
The Zero is both tragic and satirical, a post- 9/11 book focusing on individual personal tragedy in the wake of 9/11’s shadow…but the individual tragedy in this case is not the making of the 9/11 hijackers, but is self-imposed. The protagonist, Brian Remy, is in some sort of fugue state that connects him to the lost, dead, and mourning in New York. But Remy is very much alive, and his life has been as altered as much as those who lost loved ones in the buildings. He seems to have an alternate life—or set of lives—emergent only after the city was rocked. And it appears that Remy, like Vince from Citizen Vince, may be complicit (or even guilty) of some sort of crime, although his memory is fuzzy and patchy. Set against the backdrop of the inane, tragic, comic, and realistic of New York; the characters who profit, those who grieve, those who are sanguine….Walter gives us the gamut of all possible absurd and sublime reactions to 9/11, and one man’s self-created going-through-the-motions-life juxtaposed to it. This book is structured differently than is typical, and it takes a little imagination to determine what is (is not) literal and what’s a dream, but it’s worth it.
In Land of the Blind Walter brings us a man who truly cannot see (or, who mostly cannot see) and who also happens to be narrating the story of committing a murder—the events, places, people, and things that led Clark Mason to kill Eli Boyle, the type of guy who definitely didn’t deserve it. The narration traces Eli’s relationship with Clark, from boyhood to the present, as Clark writes for a police detective the reasons (long and drawn as they are) for the murder. The police detective, Caroline Mabry, is bored, unfazed, and pondering why she feels neither compassion for victims nor loathing for criminals. But the confessor, Mason, is an enigma: a murderer with a past that intersected with her own, a man busy scheming but also atoning (he’s losing his sight by allowing his retina to detach), a one-time politician who now has no agenda. Land of the Blind may be slow on action, but its characters are richly detailed, and their interactions real and often heartbreaking. In particular, the dialog between Mason and Boyle will make you think that you are back in school with your best friend, it’s so natural and real. This is my favorite Walter novel.
It’s not often that you feel a serial killer may be more sane than the persons trying to catch him, but oddly that is the case in Walter’s first novel, Over Tumbled Graves. A serial killer is terrorizing the Pacific Northwest, and an old-school detective, Dupree, is trying to both catch the killer and at the same time mitigate the damage when two famous forensic criminologists are brought in to “solve” the case. The ensuing circus takes detective Dupree and recruit detective (with the requisite “complicated” life) Caroline Mabry close to the killer, but they learn more about their colleagues and the public than the killer himself. Indeed, there may be more depravity in those who watch for the next kill, who wait for the next body, and who write the books, film the movies, and who otherwise become fascinated with and hero worship these killers. The underside, as it is, is less the murderer than those trained to do “murderer catching” for the public, and the public who eagerly watches. An indictment on our fascination with sociopaths.
Walter’s earliest book—a nonfiction account of the stand off Ruby Ridge (The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family), and his latest, a novel about how a man takes care of his family by entering the crime business (The Financial Lives of the Poets), bracket these four novels. No two Walter books are alike, so despite the similar theme (mostly crime) each one stands alone, apart from the genre in general and each other