Book Review

By Derryll White

Lippman, Laura (2011).  the most dangerous thing.

Laura Lippman is varied enough and accomplished enough as a writer for the reader to explore her back list with expectations of pleasure and value.  In this novel, as always, the author embraces the comfort of her hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, for the setting.  It works well as Laura Lippman has her characters explore haunts and landscapes that she intimately knows.

This familiarity extends to the time period. Much of the activity occurs between 1976 and 1980 and Laura Lippman’s language accommodates this.  She doesn’t hesitate to use words such as ‘queer’ in their original connotation of odd or strange.  She has her characters exploring first love at 14 and 15, some losing their virginity before the age of consent.  She lays life out as it was in the 1970s.

The author searches for the truth throughout the story, one which she admits is biographical in many ways.  It is a study of family interaction and neighbour expectations.  She keeps it all clear and keeps the many secrets close until the end.  Classified as a mystery writer by some, Lippman breaks the mold and, as in this volume, becomes as Gillian Flynn wrote “simply a brilliant novelist.”

The author was born in 1959 and here talks at length about the freedom that children then enjoyed. One could walk out the door, say “I’ll be back for supper” and roam, usually with friends, freely into both forest and urban pathways. This was a time only some of us remember.  Lippman is adroit in presenting the layers of interaction that people have with each other.

The fact that it all rings true reveals why Stephen King called her “Special, even extraordinary.”  She is a joy to read.

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Excerpts from the novel:

AUTUMN 1978-WINTER 1979 – The wind had started to kick up, the pleasant tang of October had given way to a steady dark cold.  Weather was more reliable then.  This is not memory, but hard scientific fact.  The weather of our childhood was part of an unusually temperate time on our planet, with fewer extreme variations.  The things we have seen in recent years – the events of just the past year, with almost a hundred inches of snow in Baltimore and floods, not to mention volcanoes and earthquakes, birds falling from the skies – might well be connected to climate change, the wear and tear that humans wreak on a planet.  We are not here to argue science.

STEWARDESS – Wendy is still a reserve, being plugged into the schedule where she fits.  Maybe she’d be a better sport about working her way up if she weren’t also McKey’s age, possibly older.  She looks older, that’s for sure.  The airlines hire lots of over-forty attendants these days, women  reentering the workforce as nests empty or husbands decamp.  The airlines probably think that mothers and wives are well suited to waiting on a group of people who regress to childhood – and a surly, drunken childhood at that – the minute they board an airplane.

GROWING UP – We had not seen the movie Animal House.  We were too young.  But it had filtered down into the culture, and we knew the set pieces, some of the lines.  It was soon to be the era of trickle-down economics, but if you asked us, we would have said that adulthood, too, was a process of trickling down, that we picked up the scraps of adult life as surely as we went behind our parents at their dinner parties and stole sips from their glasses, bites from their plates.  We shook cigarettes free from open packets, took tiny swigs from the bottles in the liquor cabinet.  They knew, they had to know, because we know now everything our children do, no matter how sly they think they are.  The difference is that our parents approved.

CHEATING – Buit mainly she’s sad because he’s done something he can never take back.  And she knows he’ll want to take it back, whatever the outcome, even if there is no outcome.  Her father may be right about people being too honest.  But the problem with cheating is that you can never be spared that knowledge about yourself, whether you tell or not.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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