School Days (Robert B. Parker)
I'm a mystery novel addict--I've been known to read mysteries in times of stress like some people chain smoke, starting a new books from the back cover of the last one. I discovered Parker a few years ago, and happily worked my way through the Spenser books over the course of a year or so.
I like Spenser. Yeah, they're really short--practically novellas--but they're fun. I like the 1st person, tongue-in-cheek narration: "It came the way I knew it would, a long slow looping right punch that I could have slipped while writing my memoirs" (Hugger Mugger). Part of what Parker does well is collect an ensemble of secondary characters that the reader enjoys seeing again--not just Spenser's girlfriend and his best friend, Susan and Hawk, but Martin Quirk, Frank Belson, Tedy Sapp, Bobby Horse, Chollo, Vinny Morris, etc. Most books involve some subset of these characters in some combination (Potshot has darn near all of them together).
School Days breaks this pattern, and I think it's deliberate. Susan is out of town for the duration of the novel's action. Hawk just doesn't appear, and neither do any of the other usuals. The only characters recurring from other books are Rita Fiore, a lawyer whom Spenser needs to talk to for plot reasons, and Major Johnson, who hasn't been in many books since we met him as a tough gang leader in the housing projects in Double Deuce. Neither of these characters are close to Spenser (although Rita would like to be), and as a result he's much more isolated in this book than he has been in any of the novels with the possible exception of Valediction. Parker's decision to leave Spenser on his own ties with the subject of the book's mystery--a school shooting, done by two teenaged boys at their high school in an affluent suburb. The parallels to the Columbine shooting are obvious, and since this book does not mention anything from the previous Spenser novel, Cold Service, and is coming out less than 12 months after it, I wonder if Parker didn't write this years ago and wait to publish it.
Spenser's client is the grandmother of one of the alleged shooters, who doesn't believe her grandson did it. Spenser's investigation brings him up against several people in the community involved, nearly all of whom are grasping hold of a collective amnesia as a way of dealing with what happened, and with their own flaws and mistakes that led to the violence in the school. The police, the school president/principal, the families of the two boys don't want to talk about what happened. Contrary to what we might expect, the other kids from the school, who knew the alleged shooters and the victims, are the only ones willing to talk about it and seem to be dealing with it better than their adult counterparts. Spenser's isolation in the novel mirrors that of the accused shooters, both before and after the crime. Parker's novel refuses the sort of canonizing / demonizing dynamic that the media leapt to when Dylan Kliebold and Eric Harris opened fire in Columbine. The novel still comes up with something like an explanation for the events in the school, but it isn't grounded in the saintliness of the victims and the unabashed evil of the shooters. Parker's novel isn't attempting a justification of Columbine, nor really an explanation; the book is more about people's reactions to "unspeakable" crimes than the mystery itself. As a side note, the presence of Major Johnson silently points to the question of why the shooting of rich white kids by other rich white kids should be "unspeakable" and shocking to everyone, while the victim and the accused in Double Deuce are about the same age as the kids in School Days and the press doesn't seem to care. I think that is why he, and not Hawk, serves as Spenser's underworld connection in this novel.
This is one of the darker Spenser books, due to its subject matter. Adults mess up--even Spenser makes an uncharacteristic mistake--with fatal consequences for the teenagers who depend on them. By sheer coincidence, this is the second mystery novel about a school shooting I've read in the last two months--the other, Ian Rankin's A Question of Blood, makes several open references to the Dunblaine massacre and seems to be another author's way of dealing with the terrible spectre of violence in school. I'll have a separate post in it some time in the future.
Normally Spenser novels involve him cooking up a storm, but I don't remember that as a prominent feature in this one. It's hard to go from such a dark subject to a cheery recipe selection, so I'll conclude by suggesting that you make the favorite dish for one of your family members sometime, and be sure you sit down together to eat it.
I like Spenser. Yeah, they're really short--practically novellas--but they're fun. I like the 1st person, tongue-in-cheek narration: "It came the way I knew it would, a long slow looping right punch that I could have slipped while writing my memoirs" (Hugger Mugger). Part of what Parker does well is collect an ensemble of secondary characters that the reader enjoys seeing again--not just Spenser's girlfriend and his best friend, Susan and Hawk, but Martin Quirk, Frank Belson, Tedy Sapp, Bobby Horse, Chollo, Vinny Morris, etc. Most books involve some subset of these characters in some combination (Potshot has darn near all of them together).
School Days breaks this pattern, and I think it's deliberate. Susan is out of town for the duration of the novel's action. Hawk just doesn't appear, and neither do any of the other usuals. The only characters recurring from other books are Rita Fiore, a lawyer whom Spenser needs to talk to for plot reasons, and Major Johnson, who hasn't been in many books since we met him as a tough gang leader in the housing projects in Double Deuce. Neither of these characters are close to Spenser (although Rita would like to be), and as a result he's much more isolated in this book than he has been in any of the novels with the possible exception of Valediction. Parker's decision to leave Spenser on his own ties with the subject of the book's mystery--a school shooting, done by two teenaged boys at their high school in an affluent suburb. The parallels to the Columbine shooting are obvious, and since this book does not mention anything from the previous Spenser novel, Cold Service, and is coming out less than 12 months after it, I wonder if Parker didn't write this years ago and wait to publish it.
Spenser's client is the grandmother of one of the alleged shooters, who doesn't believe her grandson did it. Spenser's investigation brings him up against several people in the community involved, nearly all of whom are grasping hold of a collective amnesia as a way of dealing with what happened, and with their own flaws and mistakes that led to the violence in the school. The police, the school president/principal, the families of the two boys don't want to talk about what happened. Contrary to what we might expect, the other kids from the school, who knew the alleged shooters and the victims, are the only ones willing to talk about it and seem to be dealing with it better than their adult counterparts. Spenser's isolation in the novel mirrors that of the accused shooters, both before and after the crime. Parker's novel refuses the sort of canonizing / demonizing dynamic that the media leapt to when Dylan Kliebold and Eric Harris opened fire in Columbine. The novel still comes up with something like an explanation for the events in the school, but it isn't grounded in the saintliness of the victims and the unabashed evil of the shooters. Parker's novel isn't attempting a justification of Columbine, nor really an explanation; the book is more about people's reactions to "unspeakable" crimes than the mystery itself. As a side note, the presence of Major Johnson silently points to the question of why the shooting of rich white kids by other rich white kids should be "unspeakable" and shocking to everyone, while the victim and the accused in Double Deuce are about the same age as the kids in School Days and the press doesn't seem to care. I think that is why he, and not Hawk, serves as Spenser's underworld connection in this novel.
This is one of the darker Spenser books, due to its subject matter. Adults mess up--even Spenser makes an uncharacteristic mistake--with fatal consequences for the teenagers who depend on them. By sheer coincidence, this is the second mystery novel about a school shooting I've read in the last two months--the other, Ian Rankin's A Question of Blood, makes several open references to the Dunblaine massacre and seems to be another author's way of dealing with the terrible spectre of violence in school. I'll have a separate post in it some time in the future.
Normally Spenser novels involve him cooking up a storm, but I don't remember that as a prominent feature in this one. It's hard to go from such a dark subject to a cheery recipe selection, so I'll conclude by suggesting that you make the favorite dish for one of your family members sometime, and be sure you sit down together to eat it.
posted by Rebecca Brackmann at 3:53 PM
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