The Turnaround by George Pelecanos

The Barnes & Noble Review

"MILLIONS ARE TO BE GRABBED OUT HERE AND YOUR ONLY COMPETITION IS IDIOTS,'' Herman Mankiewicz telegrammed Ben Hecht in 1927 by way of luring him to Hollywood. "DON'T LET THIS GET AROUND."

Now that George Pelecanos has made his score writing for HBO's The Wire -- and helped turn out some great television scripts along the way -- it's good to know that he's getting back to his first calling. On a good day, the author of Hell to Pay and Soul Circus is one of the sharpest writers in America -- perhaps the sharpest. And his social passions deepen his reach beyond the cynicism that the underworld milieu of an Elmore Leonard or George Higgins, however expertly rendered, can sometimes reflect all too accurately. A romantic whose characters can quote dialogue from obscure westerns without sounding like Tarantino clones, Pelecanos is devoted to chronicling urban America, the struggle bound up with becoming a good man and why it's worth dedicating yourself to that struggle.

It's an eerie coincidence that the Supreme Court decision to strike down Washington, D.C.'s, gun control law has come the same summer in which his latest book, The Turnaround, appears. In novel after novel, Pelecanos has staked out D.C.'s mean streets, where blacks and whites exist in an unspoken, easily broken truce, as his Yoknapatawpa County. The electric violence in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the formative experience of his youth; he returns obsessively to the issues of race and class with the verisimilitude of one who has been there.

Along with Richard Price and Dennis Lehane (both of whom were colleagues of Pelecanos on The Wire, which wound up looking like an employment agency for the best writers in the country), his work has insistently brought home the realities of the urban experience to a fictional landscape too often dominated by the domestic problems of academics or the snarky meta-fiction of young wannabe litterateurs on the make. Of course, the debate between these two schools of writing can be oversimplified: In one corner, the Scotch-swigging, dope-smoking hard guys whose book jacket bios always seem to include a stint as a longshoreman or cabdriver; in the other, the literary heirs of John Updike, exploring thoroughly genteel dilemmas native to life in interchangeable suburban communities. (The fact that a new documentary has come out honoring the questionable legacy of "Dr." Hunter S. Thompson has not helped matters in this regard.)

Like Price, who has dealt with the complex tangle of class and race in Freedomland, Samaritan, and Lush Life, Pelecanos is certainly in the tough-minded, tender-hearted camp. But his work succeeds not merely on the merits of its appointed social and moral landscape but on the sheer quality of the writing -- an achievement repeated, for the most part, in The Turnaround.

The "turnaround" of the title is a metaphor, but it also has a literal reference: a dead end in Heathrow Heights, a black neighborhood where three aimless white high school stoner buddies find themselves trapped, after deciding to show off to each other by taking a joyride and hurling racial epithets at the locals. The consequences are predictably tragic: the driver, Billy Cachoris, is shot to death; Nick Pappas, the novel's working-class protagonist, almost loses an eye; and the third boy, Pete Whitten, flees the scene like a scared rabbit.

The incident marks the end of Pappas's youth -- he abandons his literary dreams to take over his father's Greek restaurant and try to become a better man. Meanwhile, the three black kids involved in the retaliatory strike find their lives incalculably turned around as well. Two go to prison, whereas the third -- the most culpable -- escapes punishment when his older brother decides to take the rap.

The lives of these two groups become intertwined again, through a plot mechanism that seems uncharacteristically creaky: the shooter, Raymond Monroe, who has taken a job as a physical therapist at Walter Reade Hospital as an attempt at atonement, has an accidental encounter with Pappas at the hospital and seeks him out, looking for a way to try to repair the damage in a world gone inescapably wrong. Their rapprochement is complicated by the involvement of Charles Baker, a prison-hardened tough responsible for beating up Pappas, as he attempts to shake down Whitten, now a yuppified lawyer, for "reparations'' after seeing his name in the newspapers. He's a lowlife who could come straight out of the pages of The Friends of Eddie Coyle or Elmore Leonard's Detroit trilogy.

The central theme of The Turnaround seems to be the idea of possibility -- so it feels a little odd that the sections dealing with Baker's lame attempt at a scam have more energy than some of the rest of the book. The prose sometimes feels slack, at least in comparison to the high standard Pelecanos set for himself in books like Nick's Trip, an updated urban homage to The Long Goodbye whose sentences crackle with Raymond Chandler–esque precision, or Soul Circus, in which he subverts the private eye genre into a larger statement about race and character without getting all preachy on us.

"Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk," Norman Mailer wrote in his infamous essay, "The White Negro," in 1957. "The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, job and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible." Unlike Mailer, however, Pelecanos always convinces us that he's at home in his milieu -- he's never slumming. And in The Turnaround, as in his previous works, he's a one-man encyclopedia of the sounds of '70s funk and soul music -- tunes so obviously engraved in his DNA that they eclipse more conventional literary influences.

Music, rebellion, violence, and redemption are all on the table, along with the willingness to entertain a change in the lives of the characters he depicts and in the politics of the nation they -- and we -- live in. All of which fires the hope that Pelecanos might think about moving a step or two outside the comfort zone of the genre fiction in which he has proved himself so expert and make a literary "turnaround" worthy of his extraordinary gifts. That's a sound I'd like to hear. --Paul Wilner

A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Paul Wilner is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times Book Review sections, the online magazine obit-mag.com, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times "Arts and Leisure" section, among other publications.

From the Publisher

On a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three teenagers drove into an unfamiliar neighborhood and six lives were altered forever.

Thirty five years later, one survivor of that night reaches out to another, opening a door that could lead to salvation. But another survivor is now out of prison, looking for reparation in any form he can find it.

THE TURNAROUND takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the '70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war. It is a novel of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and violent redemption, another compelling, highly charged novel from George Pelecanos, "the best crime novelist in America." -Oregonian

—George Pelecanos' most recent novel, The Night Gardener, hit the New York Times Bestseller List and made more than 10 "Best Of 2006" lists including Salon, Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, Washington Post Book World, Miami Herald, and Entertainment Weekly.

—TheLos Angeles Times nominated The Night Gardener for the 2006 Best Mystery/Thriller Book Award.

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

George Pelecanos's fine new novel continues the remarkable portrait of this city he has been producing for the past 16 years. The Turnaround is his 15th novel and probably his most accessible. The unnerving violence, often drug-related, that marked many of his earlier books is muted here. The story begins with a racially inspired murder, but in time the old hatreds give way to a quest for forgiveness. It's a mature story, told with easy mastery, and no one who cares about Washington and about excellence in American writing should miss it.

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

George Pelecanos, the working man's champion among genre authors, is still keeping close neighborhood watch in The Turnaround, alert to signs of the social rot and moral decay that contribute to the generational cycles of urban crime. The home truths he examines here—that bad boys, like good boys, get their values from their fathers, and that fatherless boys are easy criminal prey—are familiar themes of his gritty Washington-based novels. But he has rarely pushed these articles of faith to such painful extremes or seemed so optimistic about the chances for redemption.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

"The bus he had caught was an express," Mr. Pelecanos writes about how one of the book's losers gets caught up in its inexorable movement toward darkness. But there are others here who are determined to make amends, on the theory that "you move along in life, you feel the need to make the beds you left undone." Plain as this is, it's also cogent and powerful, delivered without the preachiness into which Mr. Pelecanos has been known to lapse. He tells a tight, suspenseful story. And he packs enough of a wallop to put The Turnaround on an express bus of its own.

Publishers Weekly

As the title implies, redemption lies at the center of Pelecanos's novel as adults try to disentangle themselves from their youthful indiscretions. Some 30 years later, and still bearing the physical scars of those indiscretions, Alex Pappas halfheartedly runs a diner while dealing with the cards life has dealt him when he unexpectedly reunites with his assailants. Though there is potential for forgiveness, one of the assailants is looking to stir up trouble and bring all of them down. Dion Graham delivers a solid performance, providing a smooth-flowing narration with a deep and slightly raspy voice. His inflection and emotional projection help the more sober moments within the story. The only drawback is the similarity of his male characters' voices, which can cause confusion. A Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, June 30).(Aug.)

David Keymer - Library Journal

In 1972, three white teenagers drive into a solidly African American neighborhood bent on "rais[ing] a little hell." What follows is tragic: one boy is left dead, another scarred for life, and a young African American is in prison. Thirty years later, two survivors of that fated afternoon accidentally reconnect and explore accommodation. But a third party to these past events has more sinister plans. Crime figures prominently in Pelecanos's latest depiction of life in the grittier streets of Washington, DC, but the author of The Night Gardener has always been more than a writer of crime fiction. Like Richard Price (Lush Life) and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), with whom Pelecanos is often compared, he writes big-hearted novels of life as it is and not as we wish it were. His characters live complicated, often harrowing lives: you care what happens to them. As always, Pelecanos combines generosity of soul with scrupulous attention to detail and an acute sensitivity to the complicated dance of friendship and antagonism between people whose faces wear different colors. A virtue of this fine novel is the author's evident love for his characters, even the lost ones. Enthusiastically recommended for all general collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ4/15/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Once again using the ethnic neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., to explore issues of class and race, and the possibility of bridging those gulfs, Pelecanos (The Night Gardener, 2006, etc.) constructs a taut narrative in which the past exerts a seismic pull on the present. The backdrop of the story sends three white teenagers on a reckless 1972 joyride into a black neighborhood, alcohol undermining their better judgment, as they shout racial epithets that ignite retaliation. Black or white, everyone involved finds his life changed (and one ended) because of a mindless clash and its escalation. It isn't until 35 years later that Alex Pappas, who inherited the family's coffee shop from his father and hopes to pass it along to his son, is able to try to reconcile the past with the present, to discover what really happened on that night, to come to terms, to move on. Alex was the boy who had been most reluctant to participate in that fatal joyride, yet he went along rather than resisting. As a surprise visit reopens old wounds, the question is whether a boyhood mistake will continue to haunt him, or whether he can lay the ghosts of the past to rest. "Whatever you did before doesn't matter," says a character. "What matters now is how you make the turnaround." Pelecanos shows the distinction between those capable of making that turnaround and those who can't, while exploring a common humanity that goes deeper than differences of skin color and home turf. Between black and white, there are many shades of gray. Like his kindred spirits who have also written scripts for HBO's The Wire, Pelecanos deserves the sort of popular breakthrough that Richard Price and Dennis Lehane have enjoyed.

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