A hallmark of George Pelecanos’s writing is the generous stream of musical references, both popular and obscure, woven into his novels. To pick an easy example, you could make a hell of a playlist from the acts mentioned in the first twenty pages of King Suckerman (1997): Jimi Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield, Rufus (featuring Chaka Khan), Eddie Kendricks, Teddy Pendergrass, Mott the Hoople, and Robin Trower, among others. King Suckerman is set in 1976 and some of its characters work in a record store, but these name-drops do more than provide period atmosphere. Pelecanos deploys music to establish character, enrich theme, and deepen the sense of time and place. Discussions about movies, TV shows, and automobiles also serve a similar function in his work.
Pelecanos’s latest novel, The Man Who Came Uptown, is no exception. Early on, we are told that one of the book’s three main protagonists, a private investigator named Phil Ornazian, “played bass in a band called the People’s Drug,” opening for acts like Lungfish, Circus Lupus, Nation of Ulysses, and Slant 6. These are punk and hardcore groups from the D.C. scene and the list gives you a clear sense of Ornazian—driven, abrasive, and a little reckless. His band’s name is also an in-joke for D.C. natives: Peoples Drug was a longstanding chain of pharmacies in the Nation’s Capital until it was acquired by CVS. Later in the book, a white lawyer who lives in the gentrifying neighborhood of Park View hears Fela Kuti playing at a restaurant and thinks it’s Paul Simon. Seasoned Pelecanos fans will know immediately that this guy’s a loser.
What’s notable about The Man Who Came Uptown, though, is that in its pages the thematic amplification usually performed so centrally by music and other pop culture references has been usurped by books. This new novel is a love letter to the joys and benefits of reading—especially reading fiction. The second of the novel’s three main characters, Anna Kaplan, is a thirty-ish white librarian who works in the District’s Central Detention Facility. The first time we meet her, she is providing a reader’s advisory to a twenty-eight year old African-American inmate named Michael Hudson. She recommends Chris Offut’s Kentucky Straight and an omnibus edition of two Elmore Leonard westerns, Valdez Is Coming and Hombre. Pelecanos writes, “In the past year, since he had first been incarcerated [Michael] had become a voracious reader. His tastes ran to stories occurring outside of East Coast cities. He liked to read about the kinds of people he’d not met growing up in Washington and that were set in places he’d never visited.” He tells Anna that he never read a book in his life before he was incarcerated.
Michael is serving five years on a federal gun charge for his participation in the failed robbery of an armored car. He’s not a hardened criminal. His involvement in the botched heist is a result of aimlessness—mischief finding work for his idle hands. Back in his cell, we watch him read the opening chapter of Valdez Is Coming. Pelecanos simultaneously gives us a mini craft lecture on the book’s first paragraphs and an intimate evocation of Michael’s experience of reading them. “Michael liked how the author set everything up real fast, from jump. Like, without telling you too many details, you knew right away what was happening. It gave you a feeling and made you choose a side.” Later in the chapter, Pelecanos writes, “When [Michael] read a book, he wasn’t in his cage anymore. There wasn’t a lock on the door, or the rank smell of the dirty commode by the bunk, or his low-ass cellmate passing gas in his sleep…When he read a book, he was not locked up. He was free.”
Pelecanos doesn’t posit reading as a cure-all that will turns criminals into law-abiding citizens who spend their free time devouring highbrow fiction. Michael’s case is portrayed as an exception. The reading tastes of the other inmates Anna deals with tend, as one would expect, toward the commercial and popular: Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Donald Goines, and J.K. Rowling. Literary engagement is an unfamiliar experience for most of them. Some of the funniest moments in The Man Who Came Uptown come during the book discussions Anna leads. One prisoner laments the failure of two characters to “consommé” their relationship; another complains that Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter drove him to “thoughts of suicide.”
But it’s not all played for laughs. The dehumanizing effects of mass incarceration are bluntly depicted. During a session on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Anna provokes an intense debate over the ethics of turning the other cheek when she reads the following passage from Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech: “In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.” As we’ll see later, The Man Who Came Uptown takes this idea to heart. But first a digression.
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I was intrigued by Pelecanos’s depiction of the reading habits of the incarcerated, and reached out to an old friend of mine, Nick Licata, who teaches at East River Academy, a New York City public school on Rikers Island. Nick has taught there for a decade, working most recently with 18-21 year olds. He confirmed a lot of what Pelecanos describes, noting that the most popular titles among his students are urban lit “hood books” such as the Cartel series by Ashley JaQuavis and Animal by K’wan. Also in high demand are epic fantasy series like Harry Potter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson novels, and Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments.
Nick told me that because of the high turnover of inmates on Rikers, it is impossible to read novels with his students. He has led his class through the No Fear Shakespeare edition of Romeo and Juliet, but he tends to favor short stories and essays. One that particularly resonated with his students last year was “Little Things Are Big” by Jesús Colón, a sketch about an encounter between the narrator, a Puerto Rican man, and a young white mother traveling on the subway late at night with a large suitcase and three children. The narrator considers offering to help the young woman, but fears that she will misinterpret his gesture as a threat. Instead, he pushes past her “like a rude animal.” Later, he reprimands himself and vows to offer help in the future regardless of his fear of being rejected. In a few hundred words, it raises difficult questions about civility, race relations, and prejudice.
Without cell phones or Internet access, Nick noted, many of the young men he teaches do become avid readers. The focus of his classes is to prepare the inmates for the TASC High School Equivalency Exam. For this reason, the literacy component of the curriculum takes precedence over the literary. However, Nick says there have been students who embraced creative writing, usually memoir. He cited one inmate who came early and stayed late in his classroom in order to work on a manuscript on one of the school’s laptops.
To encourage reading and writing, Nick sometimes gives away books from the school’s book room or buys books with his own money to give to his students. These incentive volumes include Sister Soulja’s The Coldest Winter, Rikers High by Paul Volponi and the epic fantasy series already mentioned. Last year, “there was a small group of students who could not read those books fast enough,” he told me. When I asked him if any of his former students continued to read after being released from the jail, he said, he had no way of knowing. Teachers are forbidden from communicating with students once they leave Rikers.
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In Pelecanos’s novel, Michael Hudson does continue to read after “going uptown” (a colloquialism for getting out of prison). He is released early through the efforts of the investigator and erstwhile bassist Phil Ornazian and returns to his mother’s house in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. Soon Michael finds a job washing dishes in a restaurant, and gets himself a library card. He starts working through the list of books Anna has recommended to him: Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City. It’s clear that Michael’s newfound love of fiction serves as both crutch and solace as he goes through the difficult process of re-establishing a life for himself. I confess I found it distracting and lamentable that Pelecanos did not include any books by women in this informal syllabus. What would Michael have made of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Katherine Anne Porter’s “Noon Wine,” or any novel by Toni Morrison? (The author took heat last week for similar omissions from his recent New York Times “By the Book” questionnaire.)
Not long after he gets out, Michael crosses paths with Anna when she and her lawyer husband (he’s the one who doesn’t know Fela Kuti from Paul Simon) come into the restaurant where he works. Anna’s phone is snatched and a few days later, Michael tracks it down for her. A nascent romance blooms between them. At the same time, Michael’s efforts to keep on the right side of the law are jeopardized by his debt to Ornazian. (In a narrative quirk, Pelecanos refers to Michael and Anna by their first names, but Ornazian and others by their surnames.) The investigator has a lucrative side-job robbing area pimps with a friend who is a retired cop; they want Michael to serve as the getaway driver for their next hold-up. Later, they target the home of a trio of white nationalists.
Through it all, Michael keeps turning the pages and the books he reads start to bleed into Pelecanos’s text. I don’t mean this in any overtly magical-realist or postmodern way, but it was evident to me that Pelecanos was doing more than merely featuring the names of writers and novels he admires. Instead he embraces the themes of the books that Michael reads and allows them to influence the course of his own novel. It’s an intertextual relationship that struck me as being similar to the improvised variations that jazz musicians create from the melodies of existing songs. In particular, Pelecanos draws on two books that Anna recommends to Michael: Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears and Willy Vlautin’s Northline.
Mengestu’s novel, which is set in Washngton D.C., is about an Ethiopian refugee named Sepha, who runs a failing corner store in the gentrifying Logan Circle neighborhood. He becomes infatuated with a white single mother named Judith and her eleven-year-old mixed-race daughter, Naomi, who live in a restored townhouse nearby. Sepha is traumatized by his youthful experiences during the Red Terror in Ethiopia. That psychological damage coupled with the race and class divisions between Sepha and Judith prove insurmountable obstacles to their coupling. It’s not hard to see the parallels with Michael and Anna in The Man Who Came Uptown. While Mengestu’s novel ends tragically, a more measured outcome is in store for Pelecanos’s characters. He describes Michael’s reading of the novel in this way: “Took some concentration to get into, but he was glad he had given it a try. All these African immigrants throughout the city and inner suburbs, working in parking garages, owning small businesses, coffeehouses and the like, and Michael had never really thought too much about them or what was going on in their heads. Until he’d read this book.”
Pelecanos named Vlautin’s Northline as his favorite book of the first decade of the 21st Century. It’s an exemplary work of Dirty Realism or what used to be known as K-Mart Realism. In fact, about halfway through the novel, the protagonist, Allison Johnson, shops for bedding at a K-Mart in Reno, Nevada. At twenty-three, Allison has fled Las Vegas and her abusive, white-supremacist boyfriend, Jimmy Bodie. She’s pregnant by Jimmy and decides to give the baby up for adoption. Once the child has been delivered to his new family, Allison finds a job as a graveyard-shift casino waitress and tries to cope with the loneliness and anxiety of her life. She drinks too much, suffers panic attacks, contemplates suicide, engages in demeaning, casual sex, and burns herself with cigarettes. Finally she finds a kindred spirit in Dan Mahony, a timid, damaged young man who works as a janitor in the VA hospital. What’s remarkable about the book is the tender and sympathetic way that Vlautin writes about Allison. She is repeatedly saved from her most desperate moments by small acts of kindness performed by strangers. Like Mengestu’s novel, Northline is also concerned with urban renewal. It ends with Allison and Dan watching the demolition of two old casinos. “I guess no one here really cares about the past anymore,” Dan says.
Pelecanos picks up on this, too. Gentrification, marginalization, and displacement are recurring motifs in The Man Who Came Uptown. “Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own neighborhood,” Michael says to Anna.
The harmonizing of the thematic concerns shared by these three books leads us back to the Steinbeck speech quoted by Anna: “if you understand each other you will be kind to each other.” Studies have shown that reading fiction improves empathy and emotional intelligence—two qualities in short supply these days. The subtext of The Man Who Came Uptown is a deep concern with the divisiveness and the deterioration of civil life in America. Pelecanos never mentions the President or his polarizing policies by name, but there is a moment near the end of the novel when Thaddeus Ward, Ornazian’s African-American partner in crime, gives a speech to Ornazian and Michael about the renewed vigor of hate groups in the country. “I know who these people are. It’s you who doesn’t know. Either you never took the time to learn your history or you forgot. It’s the forgetting that allows the trash like them to come back. This past year has been the darkest time I can remember.”
The cure for that darkness, Pelecanos suggests, is to read a good novel. You could start with The Man Who Came Uptown—or any of the titles mentioned in its pages.
