- Lileks, James.
Graveyard Special.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2012.
ASIN B00962GFES.
-
This novel, set in the
Dinkytown
neighbourhood of Minneapolis, adjacent to the University
of Minnesota campus, in 1980, is narrated in the first
person by Robert (not Bob) Thompson, an art history
major at the university, experiencing the metropolis after
having grown up in a small town in the north of the state.
Robert is supporting his lavish lifestyle (a second floor
room in a rooming house in Dinkytown with the U of M hockey
team living downstairs) by working nights at Mama B's
Trattoria, an Italian/American restaurant with a light
beer and wine bar, the Grotto, downstairs. His life
and career at the “Trat” and “Grot”
are an immersion in the culture of 1980, and a memoir
typical of millions in university at the epoch until a cook
at the Trat is shot dead by a bullet which came through
the window from outside, with no apparent motive or
clue as to the shooter's identity.
Then Robert begins to notice things: curious connections
between people, suggestions of drug deals, ambiguous evidence of
wire taps, radical politics, suspicions of people being
informants, and a strange propensity for people he encounters
meeting with apparently random violence. As he tries to make
sense of all of this, he encounters hard-boiled cops, an
immigrant teacher from the Soviet Union who speaks crystalline
wisdom in fractured English, and a reporter for the student
newspaper with whom he is instantly smitten. The complexity
and ambiguity spiral ever upward until you begin to suspect,
as Robert does in chapter 30, “You never get all the
answers. I suppose that's the lesson.”
Do you get all the answers? Well, read the novel and find out
for yourself—I doubt you'll regret doing so. Heck, how many
mystery novels have an action scene involving a
Zamboni? As you'd expect
from the author's work, the writing is artful and evocative,
even when describing something as peripheral to the plot as
turning off an
Asteroids
video game after closing time in the Grot.
I yanked the cord and the world of triangular spaceships and
monochromatic death-rocks collapsed to a single white point. The
universe was supposed to end like that, if there was enough mass
and matter or something. It expands until gravity hauls everything
back in; the collapse accelerates until everything that was once
scattered higgily-jiggity over eternity is now summed up in a tiny white
infinitely dense dot, which explodes anew into another Big Bang,
another universe, another iteration of existence with its own rules, a
place where perhaps Carter got a second term and Rod Stewart did
not decide to embrace disco.
I would read this novel straight through, cover-to-cover. There are
many characters who interact in complicated ways, and if you set it
aside due to other distractions and pick it up later, you may have to
do some backtracking to get back into things. There are a few
copy editing errors (I noted 7), but they don't distract from the
story.
At this writing, this book is available only as a Kindle
e-book; a paperback edition is expected in the near
future. Here are the
author's
comments on the occasion of the book's publication. This is
the first in what James Lileks intends to be a series of between
three and five novels, all set in Minneapolis in different eras,
with common threads tying them together. I eagerly await the
next.
October 2012 