As a public service, here is a list of the writers, artists, and characters mentioned in Eye of the Cricket, the fourth entry in the Lew Griffin series by James Sallis:
James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Michelangelo, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Jimmy Reed, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Queneau, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, Andre Gide, Freud, Proust, E.T.A. Hoffman, Elmer Fudd, Raymond Chandler, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Art Tatum, Spike Lee, Carl Orff, Willie Dixon, R.E.M, Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, Tchaikovsky, Chris Smither, Homer, Turlough O’Carolan, Don McLean, Arlo Guthrie, John Lee Hooker, Hank Williams Jr., William Faulkner, Bobby McFerrin, Madison Smartt Bell, Chester Himes, Richard Wagner, Sisyphus, Jean Cocteau, Knut Hamsun, Arthur Rimbaud, John Berryman, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Smart, Sam Johnson, “Bertie” Russell, Chaucer, Fats Waller, Mozart, Arrested Development, Blind Willie McTell, and Bruce Springsteen.
I might have missed one or three. No doubt James Sallis buried some others, an obscure New Orleans street name or something like that.
But, two things:
First, the references are seamless. They are part and parcel of Lew Griffin’s head, his desire to understand language and story and point of view.
And, second, they allow Griffin to riff on the world around him—deep thoughts sparked by the case and deep thoughts sparked because Lew Griffin is always processing the world as a writer, a teacher, an ex-detective, a drinker, a reader, and a big fan of music.
Examples? Okay. My paperback copy of Eye of the Cricket was chock full of those mini Post-It notes by the time I’d finished reading, but this one said “whole page.” It’s the beginning of Chapter 34:
“The city had followed Rimbaud’s advice: Je es un autre. “I” is another. Or maybe it was just that I had become another. Which I guess was pretty much young Arthur’s point. Everything had changed because I had changed. The shape of the jar defines what is contained. We can say only what language allows us to say. And to say more we must change language itself. It was a quest Rimbaud finally fled, taking his sad, doomed refuge in Abyssinia. But he’d almost done it. He’d bent language almost, almost, into new shapes—before it sprang back.
“And now I was in a kind of Abyssinia myself.
“Soon enough I’d lost all sense of time; I might just as easily have been on the streets a week, six or eight weeks, months on end. Not that anything was lost. On the contrary, each moment was scored deeply into my memory. That very immediacy mitigated time’s flow. Days and time of day had become irrelevant. Only the moment mattered.”
Now that’s how you take advantage of a Rimbaud reference and turn it into something that hits all your themes—identity, language, time. And searching, both the interior self and around the seedy streets of New Orleans, frequently thinking about his relationship with the late LaVerne Adams.
So it probably goes without saying that Eye of the Cricket is not your straightforward mystery. The presence of Lew Griffin, ex-detective, suggests this is a mystery. There is a missing 15-year-old boy. There is a rash of recent armed robberies. And there’s the derelict who turns up in a hospital claiming to be Lew Griffin, carrying a copy of one of Lew’s novels, and soon disappears. And there’s all the thoughts, off and on, about Griffin’s son David.
But these are slippery, loose bones to a story with precious little order. Eye of the Cricket is staunchly anti-plot. It’s firmly pro idea—big ideas. Because Lew Griffin is also struggling with writing a novel and he’s “quit trying to finesse the failures and forfeitures” of his own life into fiction. He’s “quit trying to force patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch can of what I actually lived, the rigorous disorder of my days.”
At one point early on, Griffin is teaching Ulysses and he refers to one sequence as “phantasmagoric, equal parts dreaming or nightmares or drunken carousing” and that’s a good description of Eye of the Cricket, too. It’s a novel that wanders, frequently in retrospective mode.
“The past is no insubstantial, thready thing, sunlight slanting through shutters into cool rooms, pools and standards of mist adrift at roadside, memories that flutter from our hands the instant we open them. Rather is it all too substantial, bluntly physical, like a boulder or cement block growing ever denser, ever larger there behind us, displacing and pushing us forward. And yes: in its mindless rocklike, solid, unstoppable way, it pursues us.”
Lew Griffin knows inertia. He knows forward progress, too. For a guy who understands the “phantasmagoric” elements of Ulysses and routinely contemplates Rimbaud, who pushed the boundaries of poetry and paved the way for surrealism (believe me, this isn’t my walking around knowledge; I looked it up), Griffin is deeply self-aware of his strengths and weaknesses. His own self-loathing. He’s aware of the holes in his life he’s lost to drinking. He’s aware of his own lack of direction.
Change. Metamorphosis. New skins. New beginnings. Lew Griffin regularly ponders his inability to change. He spends a lot of staring at the metaphorical mirror. “We drag our world along with us and we can’t let them go, can’t get rid of the damned things. Trapped animals have better sense. They’ll gnaw a leg off and crawl away. We just tell ourselves that once we get the furniture inside our heads rearranged it’s going to be a new room, a new world. Sure it is.”
Eye of the Cricket wouldn’t work as a straight up mystery. It’s not built for that. Griffin’s world is full of “angles, sharp turns, snags.” Why should the story be anything else? The story won’t force patterns, either, no matter how comforting and fetching that might be.
Griffin, in fact, knows he’s a story. He’s the story he’s telling himself. And he’s doing everything he can, even if it means doing nothing, to not feel manipulated by the storytellers in the sky.
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Previously reviewed:
Don't Need A Diagram 