Jim Shepard does his usual excellent writing here in his review of -
MANHATTAN NOCTURNE By Colin Harrison.
The
protagonist of Colin Harrison's third novel, a top-of-the-heap tabloid
columnist named Porter Wren, sells his mayhem, scandal and tragedy in
New York City, that ''landscape of bad possibilities.'' He leads an
irregular life. (''I get calls in the night and . . . go wherever it
happened: the car, the bar, the street, the club, the store.'') He's
happily married and the devoted father of two children, but his
appetites have always landed him in trouble. In the tradition of Walter
Neff of ''Double Indemnity'' and countless other smart guys who should
have known better, Porter is now sorting through the rubble after the
fact, and making, he tells us, ''a confession and an investigation''
into the workings of his own heart. As we might expect, it all began
with a woman.
At the sort of glittering party that has Joe
Montana rubbing elbows with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Porter is
tantalized by the mysterious and beautiful Caroline Crowley. A reader
familiar with the dictates of noir will recognize the drill: she's the
most stunning woman in the room, with ''a full, throaty voice,'' and
seems jaded beyond her years. She's inexplicably focused on him.
Our
hero mutters cynical and knowing things about not playing the sap and
then hustles right off into her Erotic Web of Intrigue. She wants him to
investigate the murder of her husband, a Wunderkind film maker, himself
a chronicler of urban noir, who died violently, under baffling
circumstances. It's clear that she's not telling the whole truth. It's
clear that she's trouble. There's even a fragment of a jade figurine
involved.
Porter, however, ignores the warning signs. (Caroline's
''entire apartment was sterile. Like a hotel suite . . . it had no
character, no essence of its inhabitant''; it was all ''expensive
surfaces.'') And soon it becomes clear that he's deeply entangled with
powerful forces. But by now he's in Caroline's sexual thrall, so he
proceeds to act out the ritual we know so well: ''I washed my face and
looked in the mirror. I'd heard a lie in Caroline's voice somewhere,
maybe more than one, and I wanted to think carefully about what she'd
told me. But I was tired and my head swam with the drink.'' ''The thing
was driving me mad. There was something I wasn't seeing.''
What's
striking about this genre -- by this point a hybrid of at least the
hard-boiled detective novels of the 1930's and all the film noirs since
then -- is the way it indefatigably centers on the protagonist's anxiety
about the overtly sexual female's essential unreadability. The Bad
Woman, out for herself and willing to use her body, is the figure upon
which all the action turns, the cipher upon which the protagonist
projects meanings that leave him unsatisfied. She is the irresistible
force in a genre that prizes, above all else, control. She triggers the
titillating exchange of weakness and power that fascinates both the
protagonist and the genre's adherents. To paraphrase James M. Cain,
she's the wish that has terror in it. (One of Cain's hapless heroes
cracks, right before the roof falls in, ''I loved her like a rabbit
loves a rattlesnake.'')
Mr. Harrison, who is the author of the
well-received novels ''Bodies Electric'' and ''Break and Enter,'' this
time has produced a thriller that seems to want to be equal parts
Raymond Chandler, William Styron and Tom Wolfe. When not in his
no-nonsense Philip Marlowe mode (''I was a married newspaperman. It
didn't make much sense to me. It didn't need to, not yet''), Porter
meditates with a sad fatalism on the dark domestic crises of the heart,
or muses satirically on the grotesque inequalities of the city's
economic stratification. There is, of course, a nice dovetailing between
the world view of a novel like ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' and the
premises of noir: that vision of society as wilderness, a world of
deceptive surfaces where guilt, because it's all-pervasive, can be
assigned to sacrificial victims.
These corollary aspirations
generate some of the greatest pleasures in Mr. Harrison's novel, so that
the same narrative that impresses us with its top-to-bottom knowledge
of New York City fauna is also illuminating about the quiet acts of
omission that irrevocably damage a marriage. (Porter's wife, Lisa, is a
wonderfully drawn character.) ''Manhattan Nocturne'' is also filled with
tips for the street-smart: how to remove the Club from a steering wheel
with aerosol Freon and a hammer; how to track down a British citizen in
Manhattan without the help of a phone number, address or Social
Security number.
These sorts of pleasures also allow for
digressions (there's a discussion of back labor during delivery) and
editorials: ''These aims had been leached out of me (as they generally
have been from the American news media, which, as the 20th century draws
to a close, seems to sense its own clamoring irrelevance, its humble
subservience to a pagan culture of celebrity).'' As a result, the pace
is not exactly headlong. The digressions and editorials help inhibit the
sense of desperation and fear that usually drives such stories. (This
is a genre, after all, that lists among its titles ''Journey Into
Fear,'' ''Ministry of Fear,'' ''Fear in the Night,'' ''Sudden Fear,''
''Storm Fear,'' ''Cape Fear,'' ''Experiment in Terror,'' ''Nightmare
Alley'' and ''I Wake Up Screaming.'')
Fear seems necessary in
thematic as well as narrative terms, since we assume that what underlies
the narrator's terror of the femme fatale's impenetrability is his
terror of his own. And though Porter talks a lot about the other, dark
side of himself, he doesn't seem particularly anxious on that score.
It's as if he's had his sense of self diminished -- in a squinting,
tough-guy way -- but not really rocked. (''All this bleeding was my
fault, and I was glad that Lisa and the kids were far away from me. I
wasn't worthy of them now. Somehow this was not a surprise to me; always
I have known that I am selfish and small-hearted.'') And that may be
the point at which Styron's and Chandler's protagonists are
incompatible: part of the romance in noir seems to involve a final
secret sense of satisfaction with the self-betrayal, a sense of ''I
didn't know I had it in me.'' Which may be why, in the early stages, the
femme fatale always initiates our hero into another, more intense world
of passion.
Noir then becomes an unexpectedly unsuitable vehicle
for a literary portrait of a soul divided, since its focus, finally, is
not, as the narrator claims, on having had to dismantle and reassemble
his sense of himself so much as it is on his delight at having
reasserted control in the face of the bad woman's charms, and having
gained the power to read her accurately: ''She had a beautiful face, but
she could make it ugly, and now she did. . . . 'No, Caroline, no. You
brought me into this. You thought you could just . . . lead me around.
But you didn't study me very carefully, Caroline, you didn't figure out
how a small-town boy like me with not one connection in New York City
elbowed and hustled and hassled his way to be a newspaper columnist.' ''
The
novel's protagonist is most memorable when that small-town boy, for all
his bluster, articulates with real sadness his understanding of his own
wrongdoing, and of the damage he's done to those he loves: ''The house
will be empty again, quiet again, until someone else stands there,
looking at the windows and walls and floors, mindful perhaps that the
last occupants, my wife and children and myself, were only passing
through.''
When Porter Wren scales back from sexual athlete and social satirist to homebody, ''Manhattan Nocturne'' soars.
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