The Long Take

October 22, 2018
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this insistent novel in verse from Robertson (Sailing the Forest) captures a D-Day veteran’s tortured reckoning with the postwar hollowing out of downtown Los Angeles. Back from Europe, Walker is mesmerized by L.A., “the city/ a magnesium strip; a carnival/ on one long midway.” That romantic view is tempered by the city’s underbelly of violence, racism, and poverty, which he encounters as a cub reporter. Dismayed by Skid Row, he pitches a feature on homelessness that sends him up to San Francisco and its “play of height and depth, this/ changing sift of color and weather.” Walker returns to find downtown L.A. being “demolished and rebuilt” into highway interchanges and parking lots. “The drumfire of falling/ buildings” calls back Walker’s war memories, and Robertson skillfully intermingles imagery of battles in France and L.A.’s demolished blocks to powerfully contend that “cities are a kind of war.” Less convincing is when Robertson exchanges his magnificent depictions for pedantry, including the declaration that “they call this progress, when it’s really only greed.” Still, this novel succeeds in bringing life to a crucial moment of urban history; Robertson’s vision of Los Angeles under siege is simply indispensable.

November 15, 2018
Scottish poet Robertson serves up an epic poem of homelessness, dislocation, and inequality--set not today, though it could have been, but instead in the years after World War II.Walker: It's a good name for the protagonist, who "walks. That is his name and nature." A Canadian washed up on the shores of Manhattan, he walks among ghosts, among anonymous people who wanted simply to be anonymous, "not swallowed whole, not to disappear," though that is what the city does to people. Walker is trying to shake off his wartime experiences, having landed at Normandy on D-Day and fought his way far inland; he spends his days in taprooms, his nights waiting watchfully for nightmares. A year passes, then another, and he makes his way west to Los Angeles, his fortunes not having improved much; as a fellow traveler says to him, meaningfully, "Just look at us now: two heroes in a hostel on Skid Row." Walker finally pulls out of it in a Los Angeles whose pulse is that of movies such as The Naked City and The Big Clock; Robertson's skillful weaving of cinematic history into a storyline that embraces hard-boiled journalism, the paranoia of the McCarthy era, and a kind of reflexive if sometimes-ironic nationalism that has never disappeared ("this here is the City of the Angels, Tinseltown, sit-yoo-ated / in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave") makes for juxtapositions that are sometimes unexpected but just right. Walker finally lands a job as a reporter, but, as Robertson makes clear, that only serves to accelerate his search among the hard-bitten, the hard-drinking, and the homeless for some missing part of himself, all the while against the hallucinatory backdrop of movies like Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper and tableaux like a rotting, beached humpback whale, "one pectoral fin stretched up like a sail."Robertson's novel in verse joins a tradition that includes Louis Zukofsky, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ed Sanders, and it doesn't suffer by comparison.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 15, 2018
Arriving in New York City in 1946, young WWII veteran Walker is assailed by memories of his childhood in pristine Nova Scotia and tormented by PTSD and guilt. Unable to sleep, he paces the night streets, absorbing the city's hustle and edgy beauty, his restlessness eventually propelling him to Los Angeles. In this hypnotic and wrenching novel in verse, this noir narrative, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, award-winning Scottish poet Robertson draws on the aesthetics of classic noir films, which his protagonist loves, especially the dramatic long take. Walker, working as a newspaper reporter, performs his own long takes as he watches this desert city of celluloid dreams demolish its homes, shops, and sidewalks to build freeways and parking lots while veterans unable to find work form a desperate army of the homeless. Walker's ravishing observations, punctuated by visits to dive bars, are laced with cinematic variations on the yin-yang of dark and light as he witnesses the ravages of racism, poverty, and alcohol; takes measure of gruesome crime scenes; and despairs of ever making things right. Robertson transforms the long take into an epic taking of life, liberty, reason, and hope in this saga of a good man broken by war and a city savaged by greed, an arresting and gorgeously lyrical and disquieting tale of brutal authenticity, hard-won compassion, and stygian splendor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)