A glimpsed blowjob in a backroom of a seedy New York bar, the
last act of a red-haired woman found murdered and dismembered
only hours later, opens Susanna Moore’s fourth novel set in blue-collar
New York. Where another author – Richard Price would be at home
in the bars and precinct houses of this novel – would have highlighted
the maleness of the murder, this narrative is interwoven with
other concerns; through Frannie, a white middle-class English
teacher, Moore explores the inadequacy of language, the dark power
of erotic fixation over intelligence, the unknowableness of others.
It is as if a Martin Scorcese project starring Joe Mantegna has
been given to Jane Campion to interpret, with all the attendant
subversions of the genre that might entail.
Frannie is compiling a dictionary of slang from the streets she
lives in but apart from. It is her jittery student Cornelius who
leads her in search of words and phrases from his world of black
disenfranchised underprivilege. The language is constantly analysed
with the reader being offered lists of words misused to describe
the profane and brutal milieu. The bearers of these semantic offerings
are the men she becomes involved with: Cornelius, the detectives
Rodriguez and Jimmy Malloy who involve her in the homicide investigation
as well as masculine silences or the prosaic language of their
wearily tough world view. It is these men who form the base elements
of the novel in all their unreconstructed glory. If the men, however,
present a composite picture of hostile inadequacy, Moore does
not spare women. Frannie and her girlfriends are as inadequate
in their own way as the men they stoop to conquer.
What makes this novel to most modern urban murder novels is that
it is told convincingly from the viewpoint of a sophisticated
and intellectual woman. Clearly the threat of a rapist-killer
is given a more visceral immediacy by the female narrator, and
this is compounded by the author’s attention to the language and
the detailing of Frannie’s erotic life – few male writers aspiring
the classic noir genre would have their narrator succumb to post-coital
tristesse or ponder the wisdom of scrubbing his penis with a small
brush shaped like a duck.
The downsides are an unappealing squeamishness and bizarre primness
in descriptions of racial minorities and the frankly daft reminiscences
of Frannie about Augustine, a childhood maid. But this can still
be strongly recommended as a brave and interesting book. The unorthodox
narrative voice creates a sting in the tail that makes chilling
sense of the clash between the brutal and the intellectual, and
provides a truly shocking denouement worthy of the best thrillers.
Reviewed by Peter Rodgers
