Will Hermes, “Lou Reed: The King of New York”

I had just turned 10 years old when The Beatles popped up on Ed Sullivan and from that moment forward, I was tuned to the major rock and roll acts of the 1960’s. The Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Doors, Jimi, Led Zep, Cream, Traffic, Motown, with a little Bob Dylan thrown in here and there and all the Top 40 stuff. By the time the early 1970s rolled around, not much had changed except by then I was big into The Allman Brothers, Van Morrison and some of the intricate prog rock stuff like Yes and early Genesis. I dug Rory Gallagher (still do). And the arrival of punk got me enthused all over again by Ramones, The Clash, The Jam, Television, and many others. When it came to following rock and roll, I was Captain Obvious.

I’ve been a big music fan for sixty years, but I never quite understood The Velvet Underground. Sure I knew some of the early material. I bought ‘Live 1969’ because of that tantalizing (ahem) cover.  And I knew some of Lou Reed’s later hits and I knew his reputation as irascible but I didn’t quite understand the fit in the history of rock and roll narrative or the tsunami of bands and artists that The Velvets inspired. And who was this Nico? And how did Andy Warhol fit into this whole scene, why was he a force?

Thanks to Will Hermes, I’m now dialed in.

Lou Reed: The King of New York not only makes it clear how important and influential The Velvet Underground were during their somewhat brief run, but also goes on to track Reed’s spotty but no less fascinating solo career.

Lou Reed never stopped putting out art. Sure, there were lulls here and there. But Lou Reed took an early interest in poetry and music, learned how to perform, learned how to perform with a band, and then started writing songs in a way that allowed individual personality and point of view to infuse the tunes in a raw, hearfelt way that was being produced at the time. If there was a debut album recorded in 1966 with two more different songs than “Sunday Morning” and “Heroin,” let me know. (The album wasn’t released until 1967.)

So what you need to do is read Hermes’ brilliant 14-page preface to Lou Reed: The King of New York and you’ll be intrigued, enticed. Reed’s early songs dealt with “buying and using drugs, the psychology of addiction, of gender, of intimate-partner violence, of BDSM relationships. This was radical and groundbreaking in 1966, when his band recorded their debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico. Nowadays, when such topics make the pop charts (see Rhianna’s ‘S&M’ et al.), it’s maybe hard to imagine how unprecedented Reed’s ‘guiding-light idea’ was to ‘take rock & roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With the subject matter for adults, written so adults, like myself, could listen to it.’”

Hermes’ preface runs through all the ways the Velvets influenced music and the other forms of art, from fiction writer Denis Johnson to R.E.M to Cowboy Junkies to Tribe Called Quest and all the touchstone ways that the Velvets remain relevant and referenced to this day.

The highly detailed biography, told with a calm style, follows Reed step by step through high school and college as he endures electroshock therapy, starts absorbing the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, forms bands, listens to jazz, listens to doo-wop, explores the avant-garde arts community, and befriends Andy Warhol. “Aesthetically,” writes Hermes, “Warhol surely confirmed, and likely amplified, Reed’s notions about finding beauty in the ugly, banal, reviled, and despised, just as he mirrored Reed’s taste for repetition, noise, distortion, cultural provocation, and periodic arcs toward transcendence.”

To me, that’s the theme. Reed turned himself inside out for art and music. And he frequently did it for cultural provocation. He struggled with commercialism, but commercialism ultimately bailed him out. He struggled with professional jealousy and envy, but was ultimately revered.

Were others doing the same thing as Lou, too? Sure, Bob Dylan’s lyrics were equally personal. There were many others, too. But Billboard’s top singles for 1966 were melodic candy from The Mamas & the Papas (“California Dreamin”), ? and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”), and The Monkees (“Last Train to Clarksville”). And then there was Lou Reed and the Velvets recording a song for their first album about scoring heroin in Harlem (“I’m Waiting For My Man”). Yes, recorded in 1966. 

That first album “sat in the can,” according to Hermes, until a “viable single” could be written and Warhol suggested that Reed write something about paranoia. The result was “Sunday Morning,” a song that is the Velvets’ second most popular song of all time (behind “Pale Blue Eyes,” if you believe data from one of the popular streaming services). A song about paranoia.

Drugs play a big role in Lou Reed: The King of New York. As with a lot of these rock and roll biographies and memoirs, it’s hard (um, impossible) for an amateur like me to fathom the sheer volume of drugs that were consumed as well as the energy and effort (and money) that went into securing the needed substance du jour. Sex and relationships also play a big role here, not only Reed’s many romantic partners (male and female) but his manifold business relationships, too—nothing very stable for very long until the last chapter of his life with the singer Laurie Anderson (they were together for 21 years).

As a longtime Coloradoan, I loved coming across the tidbit that Reed and Anderson married in Boulder in 2008, with E-Town host and musician Nick Forster performing the ceremony.

Reed’s many girlfriends come and go, wives (total of three) come and go, relationships come and go, business partners come and go. Reed is the definition of tortured, restless, and unsettled. He shapeshifted between albums and phases of his career. Stretches of stability in his personal life were far and few between. He could be incredibly rough on those around him.

But Reed also comes across, over and over, as an observer of himself and the world around him. He was a big fan of other musicians, too, from Doc Pomus to Ornette Coleman to John Zorn. And he inspired, as noted, so many others. It’s pretty easy to make a case that without Lou Reed, no David Bowie (at least the David Bowie that he became) and probably no Jonathan Richman, not to mention the hundreds (probably thousands) of bands that wanted to emulate that signature minimalist sound—droning, grooving, pounding, jamming, soaring, and street-level real.

This all makes it sound as if Lou Reed: The King of New York is only about Lou. Remarkably, Hermes keeps plenty of others in the narrative mix as well, including Moe Tucker, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, Doug Yule, Robert Quine, and the many others with whom Lou Reed collaborated through good times and bad. And that list is seriously incomplete.

Reed was an innovator and he loved pushing boundaries. As Laurie Anderson said in her speech to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when Reed was inducted (in 2015, three years after Reed’s death), the song “Junior Dad” from Lulu (the opera Reed produced in collaboration with Metallica), is the sound of a song “being torn out of a body.”

In that speech, Anderson talked about how about Reed knew both pain and beauty. “And he knew that these two are often intertwined, and that was what energized them and made them vibrate.”

That comes through, loud and clear, in Hermes’ brilliant and thoughtful biography. And if you’re like me, you’ll get a better grip on when rock and roll really changed. Maybe it happened behind the scenes, for those of us not entirely plugged into the New York scene at the time, too absorbed with with Sgt. Pepper or Are You Experienced?, but Lou and the Velvets changed rock and roll for the better and they changed it forever.

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Final note: I listened to this on audio and Hermes’ narration of his own writing was fantastic. Next, I bought myself a hardback. It’s a thing of beauty.

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Final, final note: I live in the small town of Mancos, Colorado. It’s about 25 miles west of Durango in the Four Corners region. There’s a ton of live music in this area. Recently I started talking to a fellow musician and fantastic guitar player. He’s 26. (I am not!) He mentioned he always wanted to put together a band based around the songs of The Velvet Underground. I perked right up. He brought in a fellow guitar player. The second guitar player is 67. (I’m even older.) And then I found a young woman in town who happened to be just learning drums and was dying to get into a band. Her name was, yes, Mo. She was younger than the first guitar player. Said she loved the Velvets. We started practicing in January. And the more you dig into Lou Reed’s writing and the structure of these songs, the more impressive they get. Satellite of Love. Story of My Life. Pale Blue Eyes. Femme Fatale. Foggy Notion. What Goes On. (On and on…) It’s all amazing stuff. We called the band Midnight Cowboy. Here’s a clip from our first brief gig. It was this music project that sent me back down the Lou Reed / Velvets rabbit hole, trying to figure out what I’d missed and how much I missed. Why had I never stopped to think about the brilliance of “I’m Waiting For My Man”?

Linger on, you Velvets. Linger on.

James Sallis, “Eye of the Cricket”

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:

Black Hornet

Moth

The Long-Legged Fly

Barry Lopez, “Horizon”

When I think about Horizon years from now, I will picture Barry Lopez bobbing in the frigid ocean waters underneath the ice shelf in Antarctica:

“It was like swimming through the interior of a drowned cathedral, gliding above the aisles and the nave, peering into the grottoes of side chapels, floating past the choir stalls, and rising into the domes of the ceiling bays. Looking up eighty feet or so into the irregular geometry of the ice shelf front, bathed as it was in late evening sunlight from the northwest, I felt like I was standing in the apse at Chartres gazing up into the groined vaults between the capitals of the columns, complexly curved surfaces lit by the cathedral’s clerestory windows. In Antarctica there was no end to the wonder.”

Anywhere Lopez goes there is wonder. Lopez could sit in your backyard for a month and produce a few hundred pages of interesting prose. He doesn’t need to move. He only needs to sit. And ponder. The fact that he dons scuba gear to swim under the ice shelf in Antarctica is the equivalent of an action sequence in a James Bond movie, compared with the rest of the 500-plus pages in Horizon.

Lopez is happiest, it seems, alone. Except he’s never alone alone because the world teems with activity through his eyes. And soon you realize that in addition to all the magnificent reflections on time and the history of humanity that this quiet, keen-eyed writer is also pissed-off. Come for the nature and anthropology, stick around for the attitude. Lopez is irritated by our inability to recognize the barbarism that has come before us, the brutality needed to maintain them, and our ability to ignore violent despotism today.

“For schoolgirls in northern Nigeria trying to run from Boko Haram raiders laughing at their panic, for impoverished Christians in South Sudan trampled by Janjaweed cavalry, for a family blown piecemeal across a city square by one of al-Assad’s barrel bombs, the sixteenth century is now,” he writes while wandering the Galapagos.

Nearly every culture has used “barbaric perros de presa” (guard dogs) “against those it hates, or those whose possessions it desires.” And it’s not only those who directly administer physical brutality that Lopez loathes. He goes after bankers, too, for underwriting the development of slave trades, “as immoral an enterprise as anything the Mongol pariah Timur Lenk ever imagined.”

The United States does not get off the hook.

“America revolted successfully against its parent country, declaring its opposition to colonial impositions of any sort and enshrining a “melting pot” folklore that, while it claimed to welcome the oppressed, remained suspicious about and resistant to diversity. And America, the most successful of England’s former colonies, went on to become a formidable colonizer itself, imposing its system of political organization and its policies for economic growth on other nations, to the point of authorizing assassinations and supporting juntas and coups that agreed not to interfere with the international operations of American corporations. At the same time, America also ignored institutionalized social injustice around the world, like apartheid, and strong arm dictators like Suharto and Syngman Rhee, if raising an objection might create significant economic tension or disruption.”

Lopez is the anti-provincialist. He sees the whole world, its interconnectedness. He watches the Pacific ocean and thinks about the volcanoes and canyons far below. In the Arctic, looking for Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt) sites, Lopez first admires “a hearth holding the charred remains of willow twigs thinner than a pencil” and thinks about his degree of empathy with the “anonymous and long-gone residents” before telling a story from his childhood about a neighborhood girl with cerebral palsy who was hit by a car and died.

“Occasionally, I presume, this kind of childhood memory, the brutal, unregarding nature of everyday life, must come crashing through without warning for people in incongruous circumstances, as it did for me that cool summer evening walking barefoot alongside that stream.”

Lopez’ ability to interweave personal stories, his own expanding horizons, with scientific insights or, say, long takes on Charles Darwin or Captain James Cook is a marvel. He draws readers in with matter-of-fact moments. “My hands are slotted loosely in the pockets of my trousers” begins the “Port Arthur to Botany Bay” section of Horizon as Lopez heads to Australia and Tasmania. Heading to Queen Maud Mountains, he writes: “To get oriented here is difficult. The light is flat because the sky is overcast. The sun’s weak rays create only a few anemic shadows by which to judge scale and distance.” 

Through his calm style and through its detail, Lopez’ prose demands we slow down. He wants us to read the words more slowly and he wants us to take in the world at a more deliberate pace.

I’m writing this during the week of the April 8 total eclipse (2024). Millions of us travelled so they could sit in the path of totality and experience darkness and that creepy daytime temperature drop when the sun is fully blotted out. The event dominated news coverage and, well, kind of stopped us all in our tracks. Yes, total solar eclipses happen about once every year or two, but rarely across a 14-state path such as this one took. Among the frequent comments from eclipse-watchers was that the moment made them feel alone with the universe and how small it made them feel.

I’m sure Lopez would enjoy an eclipse and relish in its power as much as anyone, but it’s in as if in the collection of stops in Horizon he’s saying that it’s really all around us, every day. We don’t need the moon and sun to align just so as an excuse absorb our place in the cosmos. Sierra Crane Murdoch’s essay for the Paris Review pointed me to this Lopez quote: “Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention.”

Reading Horizon, you might feel your own heart rate slow. Reading Horizon, you might find yourself more frequently thinking about how we got here, how we’re treating the planet, and how we’re treating each other.

Ron Shelton, “The Church of Baseball – The Making of Bull Durham”

The movie “Bull Durham” is ranked No. 1 on the list of best baseball movies of all time by MLB.com and I completely concur.

Writer Will Leitch (on MLB.com): “The conversations on the mound. The tricks for getting out of a slump. The managerial motivational tactics. Which hand to swing with in a fight. ‘Bull Durham’ is a movie that understands the romance and madness of baseball better than any movie ever has, and it has an all-timer cast. The only thing better than watching this movie is watching an actual baseball game. And only barely.”

Co-signed! Yes, romance and madness.

There’s so much to love about “Bull Durham,” but reading The Church of Baseball – The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, And A Hit will help you realize several key things:

1. Writer and director Ron Shelton fought hard to keep the studios from foisting Anthony Michael Hall on him for the part of Nuke Laloosh, even after shooting started with Tim Robbins in the role. (Anthony Michael Hall did himself no favors in trying to pitch himself for the part.)
2. Susan Sarandon (Annie Savoy) flew from Italy to audition—that’s how much she wanted to be included.
3. And the success of the movie (although not seen as likely when it first debuted) is due to the deep thought and care that Shelton put into writing the dynamic three-way relationship between Crash Davis, Nuke Laloosh, and Annie Savoy. 

In fact, as I writer, I found Shelton’s description of his approach to developing and writing his main trio of characters as fascinating as the behind-the-scenes anecdotes about faking rain or Sarandon’s unrehearsed decision to push over an ironing board in a key scene.

The Church of Baseball begins with self-reflection—Shelton’s personal journal of growing up in a religious family. (This is handled quickly.) He then traces his growing fascination with television and storytelling. He even understood, at an early age, that he hated the 1942 film “The Pride of the Yankees” for its too-sentimental approach to telling the story of Lou Gehrig. He dismissed the cheap emotions of “The Babe Ruth Story,” too. 

Next, Shelton recalls his playing career in the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system, starting out in Virginia with the Bluefield Baby Birds. He describes the search for things to do to kill time while on the road as a minor league ballplayer and how movies became the solution for boredom. Sam Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch,” during a Rochester Red Wings road trip to Little Rock, gripped him to the core. He saw the movie four days in a row. “Layers kept peeling like an onion and I wanted to know more about these characters and the story and filmmaking … The story seemed to be about chaos, but it really was about order … it took place in a moral universe—or at least a universe searching for a center. As a story it kept unfolding and evolving and the moral choices kept shifting, light being shined on them in different ways.”

Fifteen years later, long after severing his baseball ties and not even paying attention to the sport, Shelton started dabbling in writing screenplays. He wrote one called “A Player To Be Named Later” about “a pitcher, a catcher, and a woman.” The screenplay led to a few Hollywood writing and non-writing jobs and then Shelton got a gig as director of the second unit for the movie “Under Fire,” shot in Nicaragua. The baseball script kept bouncing around in his head and “out of nowhere came the idea that the woman might withhold her sexual powers in order to effect an outcome—and suddenly it seemed like a hook I could pitch.”

But a hook is not enough—and here’s where Church of Baseball (the title is from an Annie Savoy line of dialogue) gets granular. Shelton immerses himself in the minor league world (again). This time, as a writer. This time, in the Carolina League. “Looking around, it was obvious—there were no agents or PR guys or handlers and certainly no fat contracts. Players weren’t entitled, they were desperate.”

And so Shelton lets us watch him develop characters, listening for voices, soaking up the atmosphere. I’m not sure if non-writers will like reading about Shelton’s thought process, but I found it riveting. And, later, it’s how Shelton starts figuring the power dynamics between Crash Davis, Nuke Laloosh, and Annie Savoy where things get sticky. And fascinating. Crash Davis, a catcher who wants at all costs to avoid ending up “in the far reaches of lower professional baseball holding out hope (probably false) that someday the big leagues will come calling.” Crash, writes Shelton, “loves something more than it loves him back.” Shelton thinks of Crash and the story like an old western; Crash as the “gunslinger without a past.” 

And along comes Nuke Laloosh and all his obliviousness that “shielded him from criticism.” And very much in between is the beguiling Annie and so starts one of the best baseball and romantic triangles on film as Nuke gets a schooled by the old pro ball player and the free spirit Annie. (Although there are layers and layers to her character, too. Maybe she’s wedded to her own routines? Expectations? How free is she?)

Shelton includes big chunks of the script in The Church of Baseball, so get ready to nerd out if you like to see how a movie looks on the page. Shelton also reflects on how key moments from his brief minor league career informed scenes in the book.

Think a script is done before shooting starts? Think again. Shelton continued to adjust lines when filming began and The Church of Baseball gives a behind-the-scenes peek at the various versions from rough edit to the polished, scored movie we see in the theater—along with the agonizing udience testing and executive brooding that goes along with that process. “Bull Durham” seemed to please audiences but didn’t generate good numbers on evaluation scorecards. Nonetheless, it became a huge hit. 

The last half of The Church of Baseball covers the casting process and the shooting of the movie itself and if you’ve seen “Bull Durham” once or twice Shelton has plenty of tidbits to share, especially around his tenaciousness at keeping the suits off his project. To Shelton, “Bull Durham” was personal. And when it came time to edit out a scene that Shelton had held dear to his heart from early on in the drafting stage, well, all writers will relate to the difficulty of Shelton’s decision. The scene, in fact, is the one that Shelton had used to audition the part of Annie. And he includes the whole scene in the book, screenplay style, so we can read what was slashed.

“It’s always your favorite scene you have to lose,” writes Shelton. “Somehow it gets in the way—it’s saying what you’ve already said or doesn’t need saying at all.” Shelton’s evaluation of why the scene didn’t work, and why it had to go, goes straight to the heart of the pitcher, the catcher, and the woman and why their “Bull Durham” crossroads plays out so powerfully. Writers will savor this deconstruction and, as I did, probably re-read it many times.

“Bull Durham” is a great film, not only a great baseball film. The Church of Baseball will help you understand why. The story seems about chaos, but it’s really about order. And it takes place in a moral universe searching for a center. Oh yeah, and it’s a love story too. There’s that.

Don Winslow, “City of Dreams”

Aeneas wandered and so Danny will, too.

Aeneas was sent to found a new city. His wife disappeared.

Danny Ryan flees the mayhem in Rhode Island. His wife died of cancer.

Danny is a hunted animal, looking for a new home. And life.

Don Winslow makes no bones about the framework and inspiration for his trilogy: The Aeneid. And the whole Trojan Horse cycle. Smarter folks than me can draw sharper comparisons, but the epic quality is unmistakable—City on Fire followed by this one, City of Dreams. (City in Ruins due next year.) 

Epic, yes. And funny, too? How can a book filled with crude characters saying and thinking and doing so many crude and violent things, also carry a sustained stretch of humor? Well, it’s Danny’s crew, The Altar Boys, and the way they try to ingratiate themselves into a Hollywood production of a movie called “Providence.” (The title is no coincidence. Danny’s Irish mob roots are in Rhode Island.) The movie causes plenty of friction as our mobsters wrestle with whether their lives can be co-opted so easily for big-screen adaptation. They even, hilariously, request producer credit.

For a guy trying to hide, getting mixed up in Hollywood would not seem like a logical choice for Danny Ryan but Winslow milks this magically, effortlessly. And much of City of Dreams shows Danny as a gangster in a strange land grappling with everyday matters like parenting his 18-month-old son Ian and caring for his elderly father.

Danny has all sorts of problems including the two million dollars’ worth of heroin he dumped the ocean back in Rhode Island, the crooked FBI agent he killed, the Italian mob that wants his head, and also the head of a Mexican drug cartel who would like to see Danny taken down. Oh, and Danny is pretty much broke. He could use a job. His plan to end the wars has backfired. Completely. 

It’s 1988, two years since City in Ruins. Danny would like to leave it all the killing behind. He even blames his wife’s cancer and her death on the mob wars because the cancer came on—“like the grief brew from her heart and spread through her chest”—after her brother was killed.

Still, once he reaches the west coast, Danny thinks he can turn the corner.

“Danny knows guys from back in the day. Guys who had made money, plenty to live on straight and just couldn’t do it. They got too bored. They missed the action, the adrenaline, so they got back in. He knows guys who got back in just because they missed the other guys. Missed the hanging out, the jokes, the ball busting, the laughs.

“A few of them are spending the rest of their lives in the joint.

“That ain’t him.

“He doesn’t miss it.

At all.”

But Danny has a heart. His memories of his late wife will tell you all you need to know about Danny. He avoids bloodshed at a key moment because he’s got a conscience and morals—it’s his fatal flaw and it brings further complications. Always.

Winslow keeps a full cast of characters afloat—we see the story from a variety of perspectives and angles. Violence abounds. And sex. You’re not going to read this for tips on how to express yourself better as woke citizen of 2023. There is a ton of Hollywood chatter and talk. Winslow’s style is lively. He refuses to get bogged down. The pages rocket along.

And then comes Chapter 22. It’s a piece of work, a Joyce-ian fever dream. It’s stream-of-monsters-consciousness and it comes out of nowhere, wonderfully, after so many punchy, blunt chapters. Desperate Danny, distraught Danny. He’s been squeezed and pressured. He’s been high and low. He’s completely strung out and wrestling with all his demons. “The forgiven fly, the unforgiven are earthbound, chained to the ground by our sins those heavy chains we groan here we die here.”

Will Danny escape? Will Danny live to see his dreams come true? Can he escape the undertow?

City of Dreams is highly entertaining, start to finish, and the title alone suggests that City in Ruins will find Danny in the wasteland once again, still searching for his new home.

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Previously reviewed: City on FIre