Honestly, who cares about books at a time like this?
Not that you need me to enumerate the ways in which the human enterprise has gone completely off the rails of late, but for the purpose of establishing a who-gives-a-crap-about-books baseline, I offer an incomplete roundup of where we find ourselves: A reality-tv star and failed real estate mogul, previously most notable for having managed the unlikely feat of going bankrupt running a casino, is now POTUS for the second time. Last year, we blew past the 1.5°C warming threshold set by the Paris Climate Agreement, but despite this we’re still burning everything that’s a) not nailed down and b) remotely flammable to power our economies. Not long ago, we all hid in our houses and washed our groceries for two years, and there’s every reason to think that bird flu will have us doing it again sooner rather than later. 1% of American households possess 30% of the country’s wealth, peanut butter is more expensive per ounce than platinum, and oh yeah, astronomers recently discovered an asteroid big enough to level a major city has a greater-than-zero chance to strike the Earth in 2032. Which, given everything else, doesn’t really sound so bad anymore.
Did I miss anything? No matter. In summary, it’s shit out there. So, yeah, in that context, books—a perennially tough sell—don’t seem to rate. At all.
And yet here you are, inexplicably still interested in books, and here I am, having written a book I hope will sell more than seven copies. Let’s talk.
I imagine people who read crime books, of both the fiction and nonfiction variety, favor the genre for a handful of reasons, most of which would make for a pretty tight Venn diagram: vicarious thrills, danger, and excitement. A chance to become acquainted with the darkest facets of our species, without running the risk of being victimized by same in the process. Narrative reinforcement of the abiding hope that, in the end, good will win out and bad will be punished and all will more or less be right with the world.
Except that, as previously mentioned, one looks around at the current moment and finds it harder and harder to believe that is the case. At a time when, to paraphrase a lately famous aphorism, the law does not bind those it protects and does not protect those it binds, maybe the best we can hope for from crime books is a blueprint for how to properly transgress, when those in charge no longer even pretend to be working for anything but their own gain and aggrandizement.
This is a state of affairs that the heroine of my new novel, Babs Dionne, would recognize as business as usual. The daughter of French-Canadian immigrants who arrived in New England in the early 20th Century to work in textile and paper mills, Babs knew intuitively from a young age that the English-speaking, Protestant power structure was never going to give her people—Francophone Catholics—a fair shake. Rather than being a good worker bee like her family and neighbors, she took power for herself—seizing control of the drug trade in her town of Waterville, Maine, and bending local government and law enforcement to her purposes. She’s a classic heroic outlaw, in the tradition of Robin Hood, Ned Kelly, and Ferris Bueller. Like them, she has little interest in trying to work within the constraints of a game that will only ever be rigged against her. And she’s willing to risk her physical freedom, and ultimately her life, to live as she will.
If you asked Babs how to properly live in an unjust time and place, first she would likely stare at you as if you’d said the stupidest thing she’d heard that week. Then she would tell you to stop being naïve: there has never been, in human history, a just time and place, and so act accordingly. Be strategic, strong, and utterly unsentimental. Fight like a rabid animal. Make your enemies understand you will endure more than they ever could. Act only out of principle, never fear or greed.
This last is, in my mind, perhaps the aspect of Babs’ character most relevant to where we find ourselves out here in the real world. At a time when the very notion of principle, and its place as our true north, seems to have given way to every dumb, ill-considered, selfish, awful, thoughtless, cruel, lizard-brained impulse, having the courage of our convictions—and behaving as such—is almost a subversive act.
Babs is a criminal, sure. But we’re all adults here, and as such we know that what’s lawful is not always what’s right. Breaking the law is sometimes a moral imperative; it was, in fact, precisely this kind of imperative that led to the founding of our nation. Doing arguably bad things in the service of what’s inarguably right is sometimes not just necessary, but the only thing that can help you sleep well at night. It may be that we find ourselves at just such a hinge in human affairs, and many of us, I think, are casting about looking for some clue regarding what to do and how to be.
I write in order to understand what I think and feel, and in writing this I’ve come to understand that, far from being worthless, books can be more important at times like ours than at any other. They can show us how to live, and how to endure. They can provide us with the longitude and latitude of our principles, and even instructions, of a kind, for how to live by them. All that’s required of us is the price of a hardcover, and the courage to act not out of fear or greed or anger, but simply according to what we know is right.
Babs does and is all the things I wish I could do and be.
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