Another Really Good Writer--John Gregory Dunne
Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction
Clearly, I'm not the first to have discovered what a good novelist John Gregory Dunne was. He's one more writer whose books I hadn't thought of reading, though, because I'd categorized him as a thriller writer, and I don't think of myself as a thriller reader.
Then I picked up Nothing Lost, which was published in 2004, a year after Dunne's sudden death. The book is certainly a page-turner. An African-American man has been tortured and murdered in an imaginary U.S. state that seems to hover between South Dakota and Nebraska. While various politicians, including the president of the United States and a right-wing congresswoman (who prefers to be called "congressman") use the apparently racially motivated murder to advance their careers, two unpleasant drifters are arrested. The evidence is scanty, and the witness not very credible.
You'll probably spot the clue as a clue when it first appears but not realize how it's a clue. This will be to your credit, because it's really disgusting.
The half-sister of one of the accused killers is a 17-year-old supermodel, and in her sole moment of good judgment during the entire book, she hires an intelligent lawyer to defend him. This lawyer hires the narrator, formerly a state prosecutor and now a not-very-successful attorney in private practice, to work with her on the case. There are a lot of characters and subplots.
Perhaps I should have read Dunne's 1994 Playland, first, since one of the subplots develops from the action in that novel. I would recommend this, but it isn't absolutely necessary.
A Washington Post review calls this novel Dunne's best and compares the book to Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities because of the writer's satrical skewering of most of the book's characters, and indeed the sheer number and variety of its characters. I'm reminded of Philip Roth's The Human Stain--lots of violence; a narrator who's also a minor character trying to make sense of a world where random events happen more frequently than controllable ones; a character with a secret. Actually, just about everyone in this novel has a secret.
John Gregory Dunne was the husband of Joan Didion, who wrote about his death in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, died about 20 months later.
