Crime in the past, but not that long ago

Citizen Vince by Jess Walter

published 2005

 

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to this book – I read and loved the author’s Beautiful Ruins a few years ago,

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

– and have had this one, a very highly-acclaimed book, an Edgar-winner, on my Kindle for ages.

It was written 20 years ago, and set 20 years before that: at the time of the 1980 US election, Reagan vs Carter. This gave me a jolt when I started it, because I had literally that day met someone I hadn’t seen in years, who made me remember where I was the night of that election. (This is of no interest to anyone but me, but it was disconcerting)

The plot follows a few days in the life of Vince Camden, who is living in Spokane, a reasonably-sized city in Washington State but not the bustling heart of the world. He is under a witness protection programme, so that’s not his real name. We follow his daily round, meet his friends, consider his low-level criminal activities (you can take the boy out of NY…)

He is concerned about two things – whom should he vote for in the election, and is there something in his past about to jump up and hit him? He’s got good reason to be suspicious, to be wondering if one of his new mates has sold him out. After some dramatic and violent events in Spokane, he escapes back to New York and tries to find out why he is being chased.

New York hasn’t changed:

Vince stands, thrilled to be reading graffiti again, like someone seeing his hometown newspaper for the first time in years.

A local policeman follows him, and the book slides  between the two stories. Dupree, the Spokane cop, is being ‘helped’ by old-school New York cop Charlie, and the scenes involving them both are startling and forever taking new turns. I particularly like that Charlie keeps boxes of new sneakers in the back of his car, as sweeteners for witnesses, friends & enemies. “Did I get your sizes right?” (and if you think you know how the Dupree/Charlie partnership is going to go, you are probably wrong)

There is quality writing in this book, and Walter has an amazing ability to convincingly get inside different people’s heads – several of the men have real main character energy (as the young people say) though tbh the women are very much seen through the men’s eyes.

One line has been running through my mind ever since reading it. Vince lies about why he has to take time off work, and when he gets back to his respectable job – making doughnuts in a bakery -  his assistant (who is scarcely a character) says this to him:

“How was the funeral, man? All sad and shit?”

Which is both hilarious, and also creates a character right there in those words. 

When he tells NY associates that he now 'makes donuts' they assume "it was one of them euphemisms" for some kind of criminal activity... which reminded me that someone once told me about young men 'doing doughnuts' (we were in England for spelling) in the multi-story carpark. I thought this was some kind of drug I'd never heard of, but it was actually a driving-fast-cars-dangerously kind of thing.

Interspersed with the poker games, the violence, the manly chitchat – there are some long looks at Vince’s thoughts about citizenship, society, right and wrong, electoral rights. I loved the local candidate who wants Spokane to have a better zoo

“Our lousy zoo is emblematic of a city and a region afraid to succeed.”

And then at one point the book goes completely off the rails and looks inside the heads of candidates Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan – I didn’t honestly see the point of that, but it was only a few pages.

As a look at America, at different people, at national identity, I thought it was really high-class, with a fascinating insight into why Reagan beat Carter so easily with the Carter family “resembling nothing so much as a poor Southern family being turned out of their home.” 

Vince goes to an election event in Spokane featuring Ronald Reagan’s son Michael

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Vince says. “…if I was running Ronald Reagan’s campaign, and he had this dickhead for a kid, where could I send him six days before the election that was far enough away that he wouldn’t be able to screw everything up?”

On the problems of the world the book had no easy answers, no easy judgements, but more thought-provoking philosophy than I was expecting in what was at the same time really a very good crime novel, with some excellent twists and surprises.

A lot of it felt as though it was relevant today: like this election speech:

… Pride in our products and our armed services and our farmers and our factory workers. Pride in our God. And we are equally bonded in our disdain for the appeasers and apologists, the radical environmentalists and atheists…

To the hippies and the socialists and pornographers, to those who hate this country, your days are numbered.

I lived in Washington State, not Spokane but Seattle, some time after the book’s setting and so there were echoes for me.

When Vince goes to vote, for the first time in his life, I was reminded of the referendums (I had no vote, but they were much discussed in local media of course) which would be on the same ballot paper as the Presidential choice

 There are five of these questions, and all of a sudden it seems like a test he didn’t study for

– and also the whole business of punch-holes and chads, which were to be so important in the 2000 Bush/Gore excitements (when I was working as a journalist on a US political magazine).

And then Vince and another outsider are mesmerized by the way the four-way stop signs work:

everyone staring at everyone else like it’s a damn tea party

It’s a great book: a look at the world, a story about redemption and about community, and an excellent and surprising crime story. The book won an Edgar award, surely well-deserved.

The splendid photos came from a book on sewing clothes for men, a book kindly donated to Clothes in Books by Chrissie Poulson.