The Disappearing Body

February 4, 2002
This new book by the author of the Howard Hughes novel Louse
is a kind of postmodern thriller in which genre elements—a gritty, unnamed American city in the 1930s; sleaze and corruption galore; tough dialogue and dark secrets from the past—are laid out with such deadpan panache that they acquire a satirical edge. This is offset, however, by an almost Dostoyevskian sense of human desperation, so that the total effect is constantly unsettling. The plot is monumentally complex, beginning with the release from jail of Victor Ribe, a veteran of the First World War, who later becomes a junkie and is framed for murder. Meanwhile, an old army buddy, Freddie Stillman, now working as a shipping clerk at a munitions manufacturer, reports seeing a murder, but the body can't be found. Further complications involve skeletons in the closet of a city prosecutor running for high office, State Department efforts to thwart the shipment of arms to the Soviets, heroin trafficking, blackmail, gangster rubouts, and efforts to resist factory unionization that seem Communist-inspired. Add several hopeless love affairs, a plucky girl reporter, a cynical newspaper editor and a dying private detective, and you have a Depression-era thriller that touches every base. Grand's skill at keeping all these balls in the air and the palpable sense of menace he creates don't quite compensate, however, for the sense that the whole book is an elaborate put-on. (Mar. 5)Forecast:Admirers of Grand's earlier book may respond to his peculiar style, but lovers of hard-boiled gangster noir will find this too opaque and cluttered. A specialized read only.

February 15, 2002
Reinventing noir has become a kind of literary parlor game, and Grand is one of its cleverest participants. Evoking a hazily surreal version of Poisonville in Hammett's " Red "Harvest, Grand sets his tale in a forbidding East Coast city in the post-Prohibition '30s, as gangsters, union bosses, and Red-baiting politicians vie for power. Into the mix comes Victor Ribe, emerging from prison after 15 years for a murder he didn't commit and uncertain who pulled the strings to get him out. The plot quickly twists its way into Chandlerian chaos, as multiple story lines converge, diverge, and converge again, and various lives are broken as a result of the machinations. Grand doesn't seem as interested in telling a story here as in sustaining a twisted version of the noir mood, and that he manages admirably, with the city itself becoming a looming, evil presence. The effect is muted a bit, however, by the nagging sense that the author (like the filmmaking Coen brothers) treats his doomed characters as playthings, useful mainly to populate his meticulously reinvented world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)