courtesy of Karen Radcliffe
Once Upon a Crime
kris saknussemm’s “psychoerotic noir fairytale” has captivating style, but a dragging plot
PrintWhen I meet Kris Saknussemm, at a Starbucks in Times Square, the first thing he says is, “Want to go to a bar?”
We head westward and talk about everything. Saknussemm is a well-traveled sophisticate who seems to have picked up something from everywhere: an openness from his early life in California, a faint Aussie accent from days spent in Melbourne, a sunny biliousness from years as an artist in all media. “Ninth Avenue is soaked in alcohol,” he says, and when we enter an Irish pub, more anecdotes help to explain his world view: tripping in the middle of a Klan-like frat procession at Dartmouth, being fired from a sequence of odd jobs, reading Nabokov and watching film noir. “If someone doesn’t know who I am in five minutes, then I’ve failed to be myself,” I say, and Saknussemm agrees.
Failing to be himself is the least of the narrator’s problems in Saknussemm’s new novel, Private Midnight. Birch Ritter is divorced, an alcoholic, a john—a detective, in short, with obvious similarities to The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty, the hard-boiled gumshoes of yore, and Saknussemm’s “on-again, off-again girlfriend,” who was “really smart but basically uneducated.”
His past—replete with murdered fathers, suicidal siblings, and a war that’s resulted in a dystopian, inescapable version of Los Angeles—colors Birch’s own world view, and Birch’s world view colors all of Private Midnight. “The powerful narrative voice will compel most readers to follow,” raves Publishers Weekly. But the beginning of the plot, with its stock murder case, may not. “We were going to interview a fresh widow,” narrates Birch, “a special breed I always enjoyed.” The drollery, resignation, and thinly veiled depression are all there.
Choosing to narrate a piece of detective fiction from a first-person standpoint is risky. Birch’s voice, at first enjoyable, grows tiresome after awhile, as it is the product of relentless anomie and endless self-loathing. Perhaps he tries too hard, like one of James Wood’s “hysterical realist” narrators. Moreover, Birch’s huge vocabulary works weirdly with his hard-boiled similes and streetwise sensibilities. For Birch, there’s no escaping his issues, and for the reader, there’s no escaping Birch—while third-person narration would have let Saknussemm switch between characters to present a wider and fuller portrait of post-apocalyptic LA, the first-person ensures that we get only Ritter’s experiences, in Ritter’s voice.
This blood-tinted and vomit-tinged tunnel vision is at the center of Private Midnight’s aesthetic project: the plot is subordinated to the details and the style. Birch’s languishing is part of his persona, but the novel’s plot suffers when he stays static. As a narrator, he isn’t compelling when he talks about 7-11, Texas Hold ‘Em, n00bs, or any of the other 21st-century cultural touchstones strewn throughout the novel. These terms are meant to signify both a sham hipness and a nouveau nostalgia. The future feels dated, except for when something’s happening.
Something does start to happen when Genevieve Wyvern, the novel’s other towering presence, enters. She starts off as a stock figure—a femme fatale—but Private Midnight is “a psychoerotic noir fairytale.” Saknussemm is up to something else here. Wyvern grows from a cliché into an existential dominatrix, a repository for all of Birch’s neuroses, insecurities, and shortcomings.
As her character expands, Birch’s shrinks and, literally, stutters. His universe had been bleak, but it least it was secure. Birch’s struggle to comprehend his new universe as everything he knows shifts beneath his feet forms the central drama of Private Midnight. The novel is well-executed and compelling, but Saknussemm feels the need to insert passages that sound like they should have come at the very beginning. The pace of Birch’s transformation, which mirrors the pace of Private Midnight’s plot, gets gummed up in day-old whiskey when it should be accelerating. There are enough ideas here for 350 pages, but the book still feels long, tedious, and overwrought at times.
Private Midnight picks up again, but in the end, it’s poorly served by its chosen medium. The cinematic passages, which reveal a richness of imagination, cannot be done justice by Birch’s language, though there’s something sympathetic about his trying. “Someone was talking about a film deal,” says Saknussemm, and to see his phantasmagorias fully realized would be exhilarating.
But in spite of Saknussemm’s enthusiasm for film and other media—he’s a painter, too, and as a “bonus” he hands me a CD, also entitled Private Midnight—it would be hard to convey the sweaty element of Private Midnight through the effortless clarity of a camera. “Ritual healings are focused on calling the soul back to the body,” says the first track of his CD. The ambient screeches give way to piano riffs and more traditional harmonies, and, in the last track, a hooker’s moans over a euphonious guitar: the disc, the cover of which shows a harlot with a gun between two giant eyes, is an attempt to encompass a warped version of everything, through the prisms of prostitution, destitution, and broken glass.
And a semi-successful attempt, at that: “I wanted Private Midnight to arouse either praise or withering attacks,” said Saknussemm—what made him attractive was less a request that people like him, but a demand that people get him. And yet Private Midnight is one of those books that couldn’t do full justice to its author’s experiences, literacy, and personality. “If you had to give Private Midnight a grade,” asked Saknussemm, “what would you give it?”
“A B,” I reply, and enjoy his company for the rest of the evening.
16 April 2009
vol. 6, issue 10
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