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GEORGE THOMAS
, April 11, 2013
(view all comments by GEORGE THOMAS)
To do justice to Geoff Peterson's second book, Bad Trades�"his first was Medicine Dog (St. Martin's Press, New York 1989)�"a reviewer wants to approach it with something like the following:
Harry's got troubles. Three months he's been crashed on a friend's couch in San Francisco and everybody's dying. Or dead. He's working graveyard and ghosts are everywhere, from Marlene Dietrich to Miles Davis. Not only that, failed writer slash wannabe hornman Harry keeps getting another man's mail. Harry desperately wants to catch a freighter out of there to China, but he can't. He'd have to leave "the loop" if he did and, besides, there's this phone call he's been expecting. . . . That's when Harry finds himself mysteriously summoned to be Nick Glegor�"it's the name of the man whose mail he's been receiving. . . .
Like any hornman worth the price of his gig, Harry's got a repertoire full of "that woman blues". Harry's in love with Elle, an every woman back in Wyoming, who just happens to be another man's wife, but she's strictly hardcore with a Porsche to nurture. Add to that�"Harry's having realsex with a strictly phonesex babe(Miz Brown To You) while he and his Wyoming wife, Jesse, are in the final round of a ten round marriage. She's already screwing around with the future husband. Not to mention Harry's problems with his mother's ghost �"she died of cancer when he was eleven. Add two daughters plus Frank, Harry's back East Dad, who can't stop sarcasms long enough to take his son's long-distance messages, and you've got a psychological pot pourri with a life size stench.
Harry's a mess. He suffers from a severe attachment problem, an identity crisis, zits, a case of the flu and he's haunted. When Harry finally hits bottom, the water under the Golden Gate Bridge is calling his name through the fog. He even tries counseling with Sara (as a young man, he was committed to the "dustbin" and underwent chemical shock treatments) but falls in love with her too. Harry's entranced by "the way she strolls the perimeter of [his] ego, then suddenly breaks in." He knows "all about transference but that doesn't change anything" because "it feels like Elle" in Sara's office. Harry's powerless, it's all way too much. . . .
The rule in recovery is�"before things get better, they always get worse. When Harry's ex puts a bullet through her brain (or a bullet is put through it) and joins an all star cast of the dead, that's when Harry takes off on a wintry flight to Wyoming where he reenters an icy world, filled with ghosts he hoped to leave behind, to solve the case of the missing femme fatales and stays there, through flu und drang, to an eye-opening finish. Maybe. . . .
Whether or not Harry gets out of Wyoming dead or alive is at the heart of this mystery. Harry inhabits a world where everything means something else and something else is exactly what's happening. He's at home nowhere, and when he's hanging around anywhere, that's just about the time for him to leave. It's the story of his life. Bad Trades is a psychological thriller, literary novel, mystery ghost romance with enough twists and turns to satisfy a housefrau with a bad case of the heebie jeebies or a Joycean fan of that little spiritual journey called Portrait of the Artist. . . .
Listen, kid, here's lookin' at you: there's a real trip waiting for you in Geoff Peterson's Bad Trades. Fail to catch this book out of here and you've missed the whole Twentieth Century Limited. Whether you can make it safely into the Twenty-First is open to debate.
Such a review would fit the era and genre that informs this excellent second novel. But then, you'd think Bad Trades is a plot-driven, detective novel when, actually, it's so much more than, and even more than, that. For all that this novel sounds, feels and is formed like an old-fashioned, hard-boiled detective novel, Bad Trades is, in all reality, Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man as created by Dashiell Hammett. That's its flavor, exactly.
Let's be quick and dead on about it: Bad Trades is the fiction of a man late in the Twentieth Century trying to solve the mystery of his life and times as forced on him by a divorce from and the suicide (or murder?) of his ex-wife, Jesse. He's carrying his whole haunted past, the complete American dream, in his psyche like a house. Though the narration travels back and forth in time from his father's WWII to Harry's own private war in the now, in space from San Fran to New York, China to Wyoming, all the way to Dante's hell and back, Harry's dream-haunted psyche is the book's central location.
From that epicenter, Harry, in a hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, voice-over voice, speaks a jazzy, monosyllabic, multi-symbolic patois, and entering that voice is like entering one of Harry's counseling sessions: "Going to meet Sara meets certain criteria of visionary art. You enter a world of doubles and disguises. A highly fluid situation, say the newscasters. Imagine life as the antithesis of plot-driven narrative, where dreams and memories clap and leave you staggering."
If you think that's a reference to T.S. Eliot, it probably is, for Mr. Peterson is a highly literate writer, as familiar with Dante as with Sam Spade, with Billie Holiday as with the Pittsburgh Pirates or Geoffrey Chaucer. Literate and imaginative, in Bad Trades, Peterson has composed a spellbinding work of real literature out of film noir and detective fiction.
From the moment Peterson opens his novel�""It's my ninety-second day of sleeping on Duane's couch. I've been up since dark watching reruns of Donna Reed without the sound. . . ."�"through sex sessions with Miz Brown and running commentaries on jazz and baseball, through a memorial service for Jesse that Harry gets tossed from for spontaneously playing his horn, and a wild Wyoming night in a sweat lodge with his alter ego, Nick Glegor (to name but a few of Harry's encounters)�"till we sit in the Epilogue, in the dark beside Harry, as he carries on a bitter discussion with Jesse's ghost�"I'll be back, she says. We're not through yet. After all, I'm your shiny room, don't you know? The room in the last desperate city. There's nobody there.�"we're in the middle of Harry's soul as he tries to piece together the mystery of it before he loses it (and his children) for good.
A keen reader understands, immediately, the symbolically charged nature of the language of Bad Trades�"for example�"that Harry's complicated relationships with the opposite sex are mirrored in his sexual escapades with Miz Brown, a phone sex, but his real sex, lady: "Being with Miz B. is like strapping your libido to a Harley-Davidson and riding into a brick wall. It's the old on-again/off-again, come hither/fuck off dynamic." Bad Trades is bound together with prose like that, in style straight out of the black and white film noir, and each line sounding notes (themes) that repeat and resound, textured and layered into a single, sweeping improvisational jazz solo that blows right through the book.
Yes, jazz�"jazz, as it was in the Forties, is loud in the book. It's a fundamental structural element�"even the ghost of Miles Davis makes a cameo appearance. Take this little throwaway passage from a nighttime duet between Harry and L. Sid, the bartender at Neptune's Cave, a bar on Judah Street:
I set my horn on the bar like a gunslinger. "Where's Miles?"
There's some confusion about who's Miles and who I am. He swabs the bar with an immaculate white rag. "You play that thing?" he asks.
"Yeah, sorta."
"Sorta? What's that, some Spanish riff?" You know 'Pick Your Spot'?"
"No, no I don't."
"Humph."
"Miles said to come."
"Miles? Who's that?"
"Miles Davis."
"Miles Davis�"he's dead."
"I know that."
The man stops cleaning to blow smoke. "So what's Miles got time for talking to you? 'Course where he's at I suppose he's got lotsa time."
He watches me. When I don't answer he pours me more coffee. "You know 'Take Care of Yourself, She Said'?"
"Uh-uh."
"How 'bout 'Ain't Busy Bein' From Nowhere No Mo'?"
"Uh, no."
"Son, this interview is over."
I pick up the horn. "I do 'Goodbye, Wyoming'."
He does a double take. "Goodbye what? That's easy," he says.
He unplugs the cigar from his face and pours a double shot of milk. "Ulcers," he says. He comes back wearing a white mustache. "Go on," he says. "Surprise me."
I play "Goodbye, Wyoming" with Elle all up in my lungs, the way it is when it's sweet. I play it clear and deep as a diving bell where it's memory and desire and nothing to kill it. Deep down, it's knowing what I gotta do but dammit dammit all to hell. Distance and beauty, man, it'll kill you. Like Billie [Holiday] said, some songs you feel so bad you can't stand it.
"Memory and desire" (there's that reference to T.S. Eliot again)�"but that passage is the technique of the book in a nutshell�"its dialogue perfect and natural yet charged, while the themes it points at blow variously through the pages of the novel like jazz solos. In that particular duet�"in the titles of the songs, the nuances of the dialogue, the relationship between the men�"resound some of the notes of the novel which will be repeated and slightly altered each time they arise as Harry moves toward his death or life at the conclusion of Bad Trades. The novel is full of scenes like that, layered with meaning, and, as I said in the opening, everything always means something else.
For all its symbolism, because Peterson writes such damn entertaining prose and dialogue, Bad Trades reads as easily as a detective novel. It’s an imaginative tour de force, an adventure. It’s a hoot, a howl and a tear. The jazz sound is pitch perfect and the prose dead on in tune with the genre it employs to tell the tale. Geoffrey Peterson's got the ear and the talent for major composition. He don' hit no false notes in this one, sweetheart.
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