If you've been reading this
particular series of columns for the last few years you know that I've very
recently fallen under the spell of Laura Lippman, the Baltimore based mystery
novelist who was the wife of David Simon and can now fully stand on her own.
By this point I've read enough
novels by her to know that her work tends to the fall into three types. There
are the Tess Monaghan novels which put her on the map, showing a young
thirty-ish former journalist as she becomes a private investigator and falls
into the seamy underbelly of Charm City. There are her more recent modern noir
novels, always female centric such as Prom Mom and Sunburn which
center of modern versions of the femme fatale and involve a lot of shady
behavior suspicious death.
Somewhere in the middle is the
work she did when she was starting to move away from the Monaghan novels and
did the kind of stories that were ostensibly about mystery but were more
character studies then anything else. These include such works as Every
Secret Thing and Life Sentences both of which deal with crimes from
the past coming back to haunt several of the main characters.
The Most Dangerous Thing, published in 2011, is an example
of the third type and is arguably the most ambitious stand-alone novel Lippman
has written so far. For one thing unlike almost every book she'd written to
that point in her career, it is the first novel that tries to look at events
from the perspective of male characters rather than solely female ones. For
another it spans a period of over thirty years and looks at multiple characters
from their past and the present to see how events have changed them – or in
some cases, may have kept them frozen in time. And perhaps most originally,
there are entire sections narrated in first person plural which in the reader's
guide Lippman says cheekily "delighted some readers, confounded others and
irritated a few." I'll get to that a little later on.
The book begins with Gordon
'Go-Go' Halloran getting thrown out of a bar after getting too drunk. He's just
been thrown out of his wife's home (his latest wife, we'll eventually
learn) and we assume that it's because for this reason. He walks for a while,
then gets behind his father's care and speeds off eventually hitting the
turnpike wall. The mystery of whether it was an accident or suicide will never
be answered, and in a sense that's irrelevant.
The next section of the novel is
called 'US'. In it we meet four people who knew Go-Go the best: his older
brothers Sean and Tim, Gwen Robison and Mickey. The novel switches between time
periods, starting in 1976 and going forward a few years and the present when
the four of them gather for Go-Go's funeral. The former sections are the ones
narrated entirely in first person plural and they center around the five of
them as children, how they became a set and how they started wandering in the
woods in a section of Baltimore known as Dickeyville.
The friendship began by
happenstance, over such things as kickball and needing teams. Mickey was Gwen's
friend and the Halloran boys played together until one day the kickball was
destroyed and rather than replace it they started 'an explorer's club'. This is
the kind of thing that children were allowed to do in the 1970s and until roughly
the end of the 20th century and the adult versions reflect on how it
happened without revealing why they stopped.
Tim and Sean were the older ones,
Sean was fifteen, Tim sixteen. Mickey and Gwen are about to turn thirteen, Go-Go
is ten. They spend the summer of 1978 wandering through Linkin Park, which as
Sean tells them is 1200 acres or so big. (The others are annoyed by this.) One
day they find a shack in the woods that they initially think is uninhabited
until the pile of rags in it talks to them. The man is an African-American homeless
person whose name nowhere ever learns and he never shares. They call him
Chicken George because they've all just seen Roots. He plays guitar for
them and asks for canned goods. The following week they return with them:
"It shouldn't have been fun
and yet it was, if only because it was a secret between the five of us…He was
ours, a new toy.
And in time, we treated him as
all children treat their toys – with increasing carelessness and indifference.
This continues from the fall of
1978 to the winter of 1979. The following summer like many adolescents Gwen
goes from a tomboy to a beautiful girl. Sean ends up noticing it and the two of
them fall in whatever passes for love in the minds of teenagers. They start
sneaking out together and when Chicken George disappears for an extending
period, they start going there to eventually have sex. Go-Go doesn't notice;
Tim and Mickey do and then the five of them start to fall apart.
Then on September 5, 1979 a hurricane
hits Baltimore. Events transpire and Mickey ends up going to the Robson home
where she tells her parents that Chicken George 'did something to Go-Go'. Clem
Robison, Mr. Halloran and Rick "Mickey's sort of step-dad' go out into the
woods. They come back and say that Chicken George is gone, supposedly because
he slipped and fell into the stream. Not long after that the group splinters
for ever and the five of them never get together again.
The four surviving adults all
attend Go-Go's funeral, though Gwen and Mackay are reluctant too. All of them
are dealing with lives that should be happy but aren't. Tim Senior is married with
three daughters and is increasingly upset at how they are keeping secrets from
him. He is a states attorney in Baltimore, looking for a career in politics and
has an attitude that is something beyond most fathers. Sean is in finance in
Florida, has married a woman who holds the purse strings in his family, and is
having difficulty accepting even the possibility his son is gay. Gwen has become
a successful magazine writer in Baltimore and has married a successful surgeon
and they have adopted a child. Mickey has changed her name to McKay – we never
find out why – and has become a flight attendant and essentially someone who
only seems to exist to manipulate men, sexually or otherwise.
Gwen and Tim still live in
Baltimore, both of them close to their surviving parents. Gwen's father, Clem,
is in his early eighties and has broken his hip. A leader in geriatric medicine
and a professor, he was married to Tally, a woman fourteen years his junior and
a free-spirited bohemian. Doris Halloran still lives in Baltimore, her husband
having died fifteen years earlier, supposedly after the Yankees beat the
Orioles in the 1996 ALCS. Mickey's mother Rita was something of a femme fatale,
having children with multiple men in her life and affairs.
Gwen ends up seeing McKay on a flight
and when she tells him about Go-Go McKay doesn't seem interested. When McKay
shows up at the funeral everyone is surprised and not necessarily happy. Later
Sean gets drunk and wakes up in McKay's bed and McKay promises he didn't do
anything to her when he was passed out. While she's there she mentions almost
by accident Go-Go had been in AA for a year and she knows because she was there
to – even though we quickly learn that's a lie.
The novel then does a section in
the aftermath of Chicken George's death but this time entirely from the
perspective of the parents. In it we see some of the truths that the children
were never truly aware of when they were young and may not be aware of now. Tim
Senior lost his job during the summer of 1979 and had a horrible temper,
something his sons ignored and the family pretended not to be aware of. We see
his open bigotry and misogyny, not out of play with conservatism. (The 1980
election is looming and he's trying to figure out if he will vote for Ted
Kennedy if he gets the Democratic nomination or Reagan.)
Doris is viewed by her sons and
her husband as a wet blanket who isn't any fun and by her husband as almost a
doormat. She's suffered through quite a few miscarriages as well as the fact
that Go-Go is clearly not the same after what happened to him in the woods. She
finds herself yearning for the companionship of the headmaster of his school
Father Andrew, because he is a priest and therefore "safe".
We also see the Robison marriage
and most critically Tally. She died of cancer at the age of 53 and Gwen has
never gotten over it. Tally is considered a figure of great attraction and free
spirit in the mostly conservative Baltimore suburb but she is hiding more than
her share of secrets. The most trivial would be appearing to lie about the ages
of both her and her husband both when they met now but that speaks to much of
the bigger problems. Tally is also frequently manic and sick of her life, going
through phases of art that never stick.
Clem is a pillar in the community
and it is through him we get the clearest picture of what happened in the woods
that night and the role everyone played in it. I will leave that part for the
reader to learn because the mystery of the novel is mainly how the characters
learn that truth. What I will say is that this section reveals the burdens the
parents have lived through their whole lives, though we shall later learn some
of them learn the truth much later. There's an old saying about the sins of the
parents being passed on to the children; Most Dangerous Thing argues the
reverse is true is here.
The final two sections of the
novel are called, respectively, 'PITY THEM and PITY US ALL. In the former
section we see how much as they want to avoid it the children are forced to
reckon with the consequences of what happened thirty years ago and how it has affected
Go-Go's life in particular the most. In the latter section, we finally find out
the truth about what really happened in the woods and how it truly divided the
group – and who the real villain of the piece is, even though its hard to know to
see them that way or not.
The Most Dangerous Thing is in many ways the most personal
novel Lippman may have written. She acknowledges in the reader's guide that she
grew up in this section of Baltimore even though all of these events are
fictional. More to the point it deals with the relationship between parents and
children and how children have an innate ability to read their parents wrong,
even after they grow up.
This is particularly true for Gwen,
who has spent her entire life believing that her parents had a perfect marriage
and that all of her failings as a wife and mother will always struggle. When
she tells her father that early in the novel, he doesn't answer right away and
then says: "I see your point of view." It's clear by the time the
book moves to Clem's perspective that everyone has gotten the Robison marriage
all wrong and that the only thing they ever did perfectly was appear to
have the perfect marriage.
Late in the novel Clem actually
comes up with a line that in a sense sums up the whole perspective of the world
today:
"Confession was good for the
soul in the same way a tweed coat is good for dandruff. A PALLIATIVE, not a
cure… So much confession, yet America's soul doesn't seem to have benefited
from it."
Palliative improves the quality
of life but doesn't fix the overall problem as Clem is aware.
This is an interesting point of
view for any writer to take, certainly one who writes mysteries where the truth
about what happened is supposed to be the climax. What no one considers – but Lippman
and her contemporaries are aware of – is just because you know who did what and
where and to whom, it doesn't make the rest of your problems going away. The
survivors eventually do learn what happened to Go-Go and Chicken George by the
end of the book but there's no catharsis, no healing. Indeed the indication is
that this will sever the four of them forever after the final meeting. And that
is before you consider what they have learned from their parents. Tim actually
says late in the book in this case the lucky ones are the dead and there's an
argument that's true. The living have to deal with consequences of their
actions and they'll all have to carry it to their graves.
The final sentence of the book
explains who the most dangerous thing was but it's hardly a revelation. And it
does nothing to answer the question I mentioned at the start of the book: who
is telling the story? Lippman has no intention of telling us, though she makes
implications that may lead readers to their own conclusions. I have my own
theory but like her I will keep it to myself. What she does imply is that even after
everything that happens in the course of the novel what the characters mourn
the most is the loss of the group. She doesn't think it’s a tragedy and they
seem to admit that by the end, but she also reminds us they are still nostalgic.
You get that sense throughout the book that all four survivors are nostalgic,
like all of us, for a simpler time. "They long for a time of innocence and
freedom, if not the cost that innocence and freedom exacted."
The epigraph that begins the
novel is from John Greenleaf Whittier's poem 'Maud Mueller'. It doesn't use its
most famous lines but one of the character's says them in the novel.
I think it's fitting the close
this review with another epigraph from a different American poet, Edna St.
Vincent Milay:
"Childhood is the garden
where nobody dies. Nobody important that is."
The Most Dangerous Thing is the greatest literary argument
I've seen so far that sometimes this is literally false, but more importantly our
society might be better off if it wasn't.
Note: I would be remiss if I
didn't mention that in a roundabout way, this is a Tess Monoghan novel after
all. Where in the chronological order of those books it is I'm not sure, but
it's nice to see that Tess hasn't changed. I suspect she would have gotten to
the bottom of this a lot quicker than the other characters would have.
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