10 SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020THUMB THROUGHthe crime fiction canon,
round up all the private detectives who
have prowled the streets of Los Angeles —
you could field a football squad. Philip Mar-
lowe at quarterback, Easy Rawlins at
strong safety, and a fierce defensive line of
framed shamuses. The other teams in the
league? Perhaps the Miami D.E.A. Agents,
the New York City Investigative Journal-
ists, the Detroit Coroners. The world of noiris well mapped, and we return to its tropes
for the comforting knowledge that the little
guy will somehow use his wits to beat the
long odds against the Man. But though he
(and it usually still is a “he”) will win the
battle, the world will remain a smoky, sinis-
ter and unfair war. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chi-
natown.” You know how these things go.
To freshen up the vibe, some inventive
authors have switched the gender of our
brooding dicks, troubled them with
Tourette’s, launched them out to space.
What about a Black mechanic from the
sticks, haunted by the ghost of his missing
father? Enter Beauregard “Bug” Montage,
the protagonist of S. A. Cosby’s “Blacktop
Wasteland,” a gritty, thrilling reminder that
small-town America has an underbelly,
too.
Beauregard’s story begins with a high-
stakes road race, on a potholed byway, ac-
companied by a chorus of crickets and
whippoorwills. Cosby immediately dis-
plays a talent for well-tuned action, raising
our heart rates and filling our nostrils with
odors of gun smoke and burned rubber. But
the real draw here is his evocative depic-
tion of rural Virginia and its denizens. Cos-by’s voice is distinctive, and he plays a
sharp-tongued Virgil as we descend into
the Hades of bucolic poverty. A tacky chair
in a trailer park looks “like a clown had
vomited on it”; a small-time crook is “as
slick as two eels in a bucketful of snot.”
Gross! Sad! And kind of fun.
The milieu is fresh; the setup, more fa-
miliar. At the onset, Beauregard has given
up crime, walking the line to support his
wife and two sons. But his auto shop is deep
in the red, and one son needs braces. The
other son needs glasses. His embittered
mother faces eviction from the nursing
home. It’s time for one last job. The good
news (for us, at least) is that Beauregard’s
running mate for that job is Ronnie “Rock
and Roll” Sessions, the eel-slick schemer,
who has a chronological series of Elvis por-
traits tattooed from shoulder to hand.
Beauregard does the heavy lifting, but it’s
Ronnie who gets Cosby’s best punch lines.
As Beauregard backslides into Ronnie’s
world, he realizes that he feels more at
home driving fast and kicking ass than he
ever did in the straight life. This is the lega-
cy bequeathed to him by his father, Antho-
ny “Ant” Montage, another ace wheelman
who skipped town when Beauregard was- “Violence is a Montage family tradi-
tion,” he muses. “He would never feel more
alive, more present.... There was truth in
that idea and sadness too.” Sadness indeed.
Because the more Beauregard exercises
his brutal skill, the deeper he sinks into the
quicksand of his father’s fate.
Cosby delivers heavy doses of imagina-
tive action and highway high jinks in lieu of
any real mystery. But this grim tale finds
its saving grace in its refusal to worship its
hero. “Blacktop Wasteland” is noir, not
myth. It’s not “Django Unchained,” and
thank God, because who would readthat?
Beauregard can’t badass his way out of the
traps of racism, poverty and absentee par-
enting. Such an escape would require dif-
ferent skills. It might even require a differ-
ent America. 0
Gut Punch
A noir thriller laced with nonstop action.
By DANIEL NIEHDANIEL NIEHis the author of “Beijing Payback.”BLACKTOP WASTELAND
By S. A. Cosby
285 pp. Flatiron Books. $26.99.THE HEADS OF STATEBLAKE BUTLER’S FOURTH NOVEL opens
with a surreal scene, caught on video, in
which a real piece of art is being systemat-
ically obliterated: Two anonymous figures
remove Willem de Kooning’s painting
“Woman III” from a wall, and a third incin-
erates it with a flamethrower as an audi-
ence looks on. The painting has been stolen
from an heiress, Alice Knott, who is ini-
tially bewildered as to why anyone would
commit such a violent act of vandalism.
The story then pivots to Alice’s bizarre
childhood, or what she remembers of it.
She has distinct memories of a family con-
sisting of a mother, a father and herself.
One day this suddenly and inexplicably
changes when the father disappears,
“without any form of friction at all, any
blight beyond where Alice herself felt it —
not her mother, no one else. The man had
simply completely ceased appearing any-
where, as far as Alice knew, including in
others’ memory but hers, or any trace of
evidence he’d ever been.” Eventually, a
new family imposes itself on Alice, this one
including the same mother, a different fa-
ther and a new twin brother.
The physical state of her childhood
home isn’t fixed either: Its size, furnish-
ings and dimensions are in flux. The fact
that neither Alice’s family nor their house
can be depended on to stay the same is, I
think, meant to obliterate any and all feel-
ings of comfort that the idea of home or
family might provide the protagonist or us,
the readers.
(Also: Alice’s twin grows up to be a seri-
al killer. That may feel like an alarming bit
of news to present as an afterthought, but I
do think it speaks to the nature and scope
of this book that I almost forgot to mention
it.)
The rest of the story revolves around
what happens when footage of the de Koo-
ning’s destruction goes viral. It leads to
more videos of art being destroyed — in-
cluding “The Strength of the Curve,” by
Tullio Crali, which is burned in an oven.
What follows is an epidemic of increas-
ingly brutal attacks against art until, at
last, Alice is caught up in this frenzy her-
self.
Butler can write clean and sharp sen-
tences — that’s in evidence in the first few
pages, on the destruction of “Woman III.”
But when the narration moves closer to Al-
ice (where it resides for the majority of the
book) the prose gets more attenuated and
confusing. If you’re not careful, you might
mistake it for messy, but I think there’s an
exceptional amount of intention and con-
trol on display in the telling of this story.
There’s no doubt that Butler is saying pre-
cisely what he means to.
Even so, I initially found it grueling toread this book. Trying to precisely compre-
hend every line of “Alice Knott” felt like
wrestling an opponent who very clearly
had the upper hand. But once I gave myself
permission to experience this prose as I do
poetry, the reading experience became
much more pleasurable and rewarding.
If you’re already familiar with Butler’s
work then I suspect you already know what
I mean. If you aren’t then let me say clearly:
Don’t expect a conventional reading experi-
ence. “Alice Knott” is a meditation on art
and perception whose form seems to serve
as both a meta-comment on the function of
the novel, and a challenge to the expecta-
tions that a reader should bring to one. It’s
rare for me to enjoy and value a book on
those terms, but this one worked for me.
And even more to the point, I respected it
for insisting that I rise to its challenge. 0Burning Desire
A twisting story in which famous paintings are destroyed.
By LAUREN WILKINSON
LAUREN WILKINSONis the author of “American
Spy.”
ALICE KNOTT
By Blake Butler
304 pp. Riverhead Books. $28.
‘The man had simply
completely ceased appearing
anywhere.’THE HEADS OF STATE