Willnot

Starred review from April 18, 2016
The discovery of a mass grave in the woods outside present-day Willnot, a small Southern town, opens this sly, nuanced tale from Sallis (Others of My Kind). Lamar Hale, Willnot’s indefatigable general practitioner and surgeon, investigates. Meanwhile, Bobby Lowndes, a troubled young combat vet whom Hale treated years before, suddenly appears back in his hometown. Lowndes’s intentions are unclear, and his ghostly presence is unsettling, especially when the FBI arrives in Willnot on his trail. Things get really eerie when Lowndes is shot by an unknown sniper, and he promptly walks out of the hospital and disappears. A series of violent incidents culminates with the shooting of Hale’s partner, Richard. Hale’s instinctive resistance to pat generalizations and reductive diagnoses makes him an effective and compassionate healer—and a good amateur sleuth. Sallis is without peer when it comes to interweaving seemingly disparate narrative threads, and his work consistently challenges readers to question their assumptions about themselves and other people. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.

April 15, 2016
From veteran Sallis (Others of My Kind, 2013, etc.) comes this short, charming novel that's part noir mystery and part small-town slice of life. The story starts fast and portentously (its first four words are "We found the bodies..."), and the book has the form of a suspense novel: there's a bewildering mass grave that must be excavated; a suddenly returned native, Bobby Lowndes, a boyhood-coma survivor who seems to be a military sniper gone AWOL, who keeps managing, wraithlike, to hide in plain sight; a dogged FBI agent named Theodora Ogden in town to track Lowndes; and more. It also has a talky, noirish tone, with lots of snappy patter and sharp, laconic, philosophical observation. But at its core, and satisfyingly, this turns out to be a character-driven novel about a thoroughly thoughtful, decent, compassionate doctor, Lamar Hale, and his community of colleagues, patients, friends, and acquaintances. Lamar and his wisecracking romantic partner, Richard, a teacher, provide a still domestic center around which the chaos revolves. Part of it is the usual stuff of noir, expertly deployed, and part the material of the eccentric-small-town novel. Sallis builds suspense over the many months the story spans by alternating between plot point and shaggy dog anecdote, making the reader wonder when and how the novel's two kinds of plot and rhythm will entwine: when will the violence and darkness finally encroach on this cozy domestic sphere and threaten or destroy it? Sallis' latest has a lot to recommend it: an ingenious and unusual use of the MacGuffin; pungent dialogue; a world that's either dark shot through with abundant light or light shot through with abundant dark; likable, complex characters. A brisk and sure-handed treat.

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June 1, 2016
Noir, we tell ourselves, is nothing but a style, a kind of literary device for writing about lives lived in extremis. And then we read James Sallis and realize that noir is all around us. Sure, it's there in Sallis' archetypal noir, Drive (2005), about a getaway-car driver who can never drive fast enough to escape his own life, but it's also there in this very different novel about a small-town southern doctor who finds his noir in everyday life and in the lives of his patients. It wouldn't get better for Frieda, or would do so by tiny, invisible increments. She would never be fine. She would never see fine, never so much as catch sight of it on a hilltop far away, beckoning. There is very little crime in this novel, despite an opening scene in which bodies are discovered in the woods and a subplot concerning a CIA agent dragging trouble in his wake. But there are many examples of Dr. Luther Hale trying to make life better for those around him by those tiny, invisible increments, while the days lumbered on, as they will. Despite the omnipresence of storm clouds, there is also a remarkably tender love story here, as Hale and his partner, Richard, a teacher, make a life for themselves as they tend the wounded souls they encounter on a daily basis and deal with the kind of random violence that drags the quotidian into a form of extremis all its own. A profoundly moving, quietly eloquent jewel of a novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)