The heavenly puff backfires
Albert Read
CRY ME A RIVER by T. R. Pearson Secker, £8.99, pp. 258 his profoundly American tale of murder in a Southern town arrives with a heavenly puff emblazoned on the cover. None other than John Grisham, author of nine-million-selling, Tom Cruise-starring The Finn, announces: 'T. R. Pearson has done it again. . . He is my favourite writer.'
This is a Twin Peaksy-Chandleresque type of novel where most of the pleasure is to be got from the incidental stories, the anecdotes and the bizarre assortment of characters. The story is quite ordinary, a conventional whodunnit posing no threat of a twist or a sudden reversal in the plot. Nor is it meant to.
Our cop, the narrator, is the standard contemplative lonely type — a little brighter than his peers, a little less content. He is out one night with his friend, Ellis, when they come across a bit of a scalp and attached hair hanging in a bush; it belongs to another cop lying in a nearby ditch. There is one clue, of which only our friend the narrator is aware: a polaroid of a naked woman, tucked away in a secret pocket of the dead man's wallet. She turns out to be the local floosy. He meets her by chance in a hardware store; she bats her eyelids; he forms an affection for this lady. Besides, he's got the polaroid in his pocket, so he knows exactly what he's in for. Unfortunately, his wisdom and his loneliness get the better of him and by the time of the grisly denouement, he has missed his chance to see her in the flesh — as it were.
Clues come, clues go. In storyline terms it is extremely routine, but in other respects Pearson does have something special to offer. What raises him above other thriller writers (like, say, John Grisham) is his sharp eye for the humdrum and the mediocre — ordinary people quietly lead- ing extraordinary lives: the sister-in-law who puts on airs when she manages to trace her distant descent from an English baronet; the controversy over the unseemly photograph of Mrs Baumgardner's behind in the local newspaper. At the funeral of the descalped cop, the other cops make a fiasco of the ceremonial firing of the guns. At the end of the book, a TV producer called Mort comes to town, much to every- one's excitement, to remake the story as a docu-drama. The police chief puts on a Hollywood cool in the face of imminent stardom. ('He stalks out of his office once every week or so and tells Janice or tells Angelene, "Get Mort on the line".') Pear- son, while not a master of plot, certainly has a superb eye for hicksville detail — the little things that really matter.
Pearson's writing is funny and percep- tive, but he is let down by his American, languorous style. For example,
Straightoff he was led to suspect that perhaps he'd not been after all intended for manage- ment on account of how Mr Shumate did not truly take to the tedium and savor the aim- lessness of overseeing that way the foreman otherwise appeared to, failed to discover much fulfillment to speak of in laying against his doorpanel and drinking icewater from Igloo while fellows mowed and graded and paved and resented plainly being watched at it.
Pearson succeeds in his bid for authen- ticity — he gets the nuances of Southern speech perfectly — but at the same time he produces sentences almost infinite in length and sometimes incomprehensible until the third or fourth attempt. For an English person it's almost like reading another language.
How disappointing to have to wade through writing like toffee fudge when there is actually something to be got from this book, and how cruel to have had our expectations raised so high by Mr Grisham, only to have them slightly dashed. To speak so categorically either says something about Mr Grisham's range of reading, (no doubt he's too busy writing — wouldn't you be?); or else they're just friends, the way we do it back home. They were probably in high school together. Or maybe their kids are dating. In any case, the puff backfires.
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