Home »
Lawrence Block is old school but worth reading
Book Review
By Derryll White
Block, Lawrence (1990). A Ticket to the Boneyard.
“Life, I’d heard someone say, is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.”
-Lawrence Block
If you read the first chapter of this book you will have a good idea OF WHY Block has won all his Edgar and Shamus awards. The language is hard, the scenes are dirty, gritty New York scenes and Matthew Scudder is living life in a black way. Like everyone, always, he is getting by in a noir world. Around him A.A. meetings abound and the landscape is a changing pastiche of Brooklyn bars. Scudder seems well-suited to this environment, familiar as it is.
Matthew Scudder, ex-cop, ex-alcoholic, unlicensed private investigator, is a moral man who reads Marcus Aurelius and examines prayers for their meaning to himself. He inhabits a world made famous by Dirty Harry. The tenements and back streets of New York become real in his telling. Old school – definitely – but worth reading as it touches a world still real to some.
Block builds a story like he is sitting beside you on a stool, at Hot Shots or some other coffee shop. He tells it, and you are transfixed. It just all rolls out.
********
Excerpts from the novel:
TATTOOS – “You don’t have any tattoos, do you?”
“No.”
“And you call yourself an alcoholic. Isn’t that when people get them, when they’re tanked?”
“Well, it never struck me as the reasoned act of a sober man.”
“No. I wouldn’t think so. I read somewhere that a high percentage of murderers are heavily tattooed.”
A.A. MEETINGS – I just let my mind drift and took emotional sanctuary in the meeting. It was a nasty world outside and I’d been seeking out the nastiest part of it for the past few hours, but in here I was just another alcoholic trying to stay sober, same as everyone else, and that made it a very safe place to be.
There we all stood and said the prayer, and then I went back out into the goddamned streets.
DEATH/LIFE – “I’ve been trying to read the private thoughts of a Roman emperor. One of the themes he keeps coming back to is that death is nothing to be afraid of. The point he makes is that since it’s inevitable sooner or later, and since you’re just as dead no matter how old you are when you die, then it doesn’t really matter how long you live.”
“What does matter?”
“How you live. How you face up to life – and to death as far as that goes.”
– 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.
