SUMMER OF ’66
By MARILYN STASIO in The New Yorker, Published: September 17, 2009
By MARILYN STASIO in The New Yorker, Published: September 17, 2009
The thing about Sara Paretsky is, she’s tough — not because she observes the bone-breaker conventions of the private-eye genre but because she doesn’t flinch from examining old social injustices others might find too shameful (and too painful) to dig up. In the dozen novels she’s written about V. I. Warshawski, her stouthearted but short-tempered Chicago P.I., Paretsky has questioned the memories of Holocaust victims, reopened wounds from the McCarthy era and repeatedly wailed on the local political machine for its flagrant corruption.
Paretsky is in full Furies mode in HARDBALL (Putnam, $26.95), which reaches back to the tumultuous summer of 1966, when Martin Luther King led civil rights marches through the Southwest Side and was met by race riots that cut through families and across generations, even spilling over into the churches. Warshawski, who was only 10 at the time, assumes the burden of other people’s memories when she agrees to help an old woman who hasn’t seen her son since he disappeared during the January blizzard of 1967.
The son, Lamont Gadsden, was in a black street gang whose members saw the light and became Dr. King’s personal bodyguards, and he was at his side in Marquette Park when rioters killed one of King’s followers. So the very white and very female private eye looking into the youth’s disappearance finds herself ignored, insulted or attacked by every bent cop, crooked pol and angry political activist who’d like to keep his own shabby sins buried in the past.
Unlike many popular crime writers, Paretsky doesn’t turn out books like some battery hen (the previous novel in this series was published in 2005), so it’s a distinct pleasure to hear her unapologetically strident voice once again. While her themes here are familiar — Chicago’s legacy of police brutality and political corruption is a never-ending source of material — she gives them a personal spin by drawing on her own experiences as a community organizer during the summer of 1966 and sharing them with a large cast of voluble and opinionated characters, whose memories are as raw as her own. There’s a real sting to both the anger of a black man who took care of a friend beaten to insensibility by racist cops and the grief of an old white woman displaced from her family home. Voices like these can ring in your ears for — oh, 40 years and more.
Paretsky is in full Furies mode in HARDBALL (Putnam, $26.95), which reaches back to the tumultuous summer of 1966, when Martin Luther King led civil rights marches through the Southwest Side and was met by race riots that cut through families and across generations, even spilling over into the churches. Warshawski, who was only 10 at the time, assumes the burden of other people’s memories when she agrees to help an old woman who hasn’t seen her son since he disappeared during the January blizzard of 1967.
The son, Lamont Gadsden, was in a black street gang whose members saw the light and became Dr. King’s personal bodyguards, and he was at his side in Marquette Park when rioters killed one of King’s followers. So the very white and very female private eye looking into the youth’s disappearance finds herself ignored, insulted or attacked by every bent cop, crooked pol and angry political activist who’d like to keep his own shabby sins buried in the past.
Unlike many popular crime writers, Paretsky doesn’t turn out books like some battery hen (the previous novel in this series was published in 2005), so it’s a distinct pleasure to hear her unapologetically strident voice once again. While her themes here are familiar — Chicago’s legacy of police brutality and political corruption is a never-ending source of material — she gives them a personal spin by drawing on her own experiences as a community organizer during the summer of 1966 and sharing them with a large cast of voluble and opinionated characters, whose memories are as raw as her own. There’s a real sting to both the anger of a black man who took care of a friend beaten to insensibility by racist cops and the grief of an old white woman displaced from her family home. Voices like these can ring in your ears for — oh, 40 years and more.
FOOTNOTE:
The Bookman is a huge fan of Sarah Paretsky and her Chicago-based private eye V.I.Warshawski and had just started reading HARDBALL this evening when he came across this review. Here in NZ and Australia the book is published by Hachette. More about that, price etc once I have finished reading it.
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