Sara Gran

Not going to lie, this was entirely unexpected. Well, not entirely--Sara Gran always knows how to hit my emotional center. But I didn't expect her to do it this intimately, in quite this way.
It was billed as horror (it's not), erotic (not really), thriller (it's not that either). What it is is classic Gran: quirky heroine, fabulous use of language, and an emotional complexity that belongs solidly in literary fiction, because, let's face it, 90% of horror/thriller/urban fantasy tends to streamline that in favor of plot and drama. This is a narrator who is now caretaker of the love of her life, a love she found rather late but lived fully, until he quickly succumbed into an advanced dementia-like state. She's maintaining a rare-book business and eventually (See also: not a thriller) gets pulled into searching for The Book of the Most Precious Substance.

I had to set it aside at times because the way she wrote about living with someone whose personality is fading moved me to tears. I was eventually able to soldier on, but the ridiculous amount of time it took me to finish this book is 90% on me--I'm caretaker for my mom with memory issues and it just hit the emotional feels too close for comfort. Had I realized that this was a vital part of Lily's story, I likely wouldn't have requested the book, and would have only approached it when I felt ready (because eventually, I will read all of Gran's work; she's just that good and her catalog is not extensive).… (more)

The end of Dope reminds me of that time I fell off the monkeybars. I landed on my back, hard enough that the wind was knocked out of me and for a second--it seemed forever--I couldn't breathe in or out, just laid there, floundering.

But that's the finish. Dope is a book about an ex-junkie who gets asked to find a missing college dropout, a woman who happens to be a current junkie. This makes a certain kind of sense to Josephine Flannigan; besides, this is 1950s NYC, and the cops don't care much about some missing junkie girl. It doesn't hurt that her parents are offering Jo more money than she's seen in her entire life.

"'Josephine.'
Maude said my name flatly, like I was dead or she wanted me to be. I sat across from her at a booth in the back of the bar, where the daylight never reached and the smell of stale beer and cigarettes never cleared. Maude had been the mistress of a gangster back in the thirties and he'd bought her this bar to set her up with something after he was gone."

The narration is from Jo's point of view, and is both direct and strangely emotionally stark. As Jo traces Nadine Nelson's footsteps, she also traces her own past. It's a quick read, scarcely more than novella length, but powerful. Woven through it in Gran's straightforward prose is a demonstration of the far-reaching effects of addiction. The miracle here is that it doesn't even sound like a sermon. Other reviewers compare it to Raymond Chandler; I haven't read him in decades so I can't speak to that, but if you want to feel like you are reading a slice of history we'd rather forget, this is the book.

"I'd never been to the campus of Barnard before, and after spending the morning there I didn't plan on ever going again. The buildings looked like courthouses, and the place was so far uptown I thought I was in Boston. The closest I'd been to it before was up to 103rd Street, where a fellow I knew sold junk in a cafeteria. When the subway had stopped there I'd almost gotten off the train out of habit."

Somehow Josephine has retained--or rediscovered?-- her humanity after getting off the dope. It was kind of heartbreaking watching her maneuver through the city in search of Nadine, and listening to her dispassionate detail of who will end up where and why. You want something that will help you find some compassion for a junkie, this might be it. For me, it didn't stand up to one of my favorite books ever, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, but I can understand why this book made Gran a force to be reckoned with.… (more)

Five million stars.

But wait, if I rate this book that high, what does that make [b:Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead|9231999|Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead|Sara Gran|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312909281s/9231999.jpg|14112168]? Fucking awesome, of course, but I rated that five stars as well. Yet these were two very different, powerful reads.

Since we parted ways with Claire way back in 2013 in [b:Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway|15814401|Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway|Sara Gran|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1368071910s/15814401.jpg|21540836], Sara Gran started writing for Southland, apparently as one of the main writers in 2012 and 13. Claire left a very significant mystery unsolved, and so I scouted everywhere for signs of Gran's activity. But is she John Scalzi? No. She, like Claire, doesn't appear to care if anyone knows who she is.

"San Fransisco didn't throw open her arms and welcome me to her bosom. No place ever had. But the only unhappy residents whose opinions I had to care about were the police."

She was on some social media for a while, then briefly, Twitter, and then she dropped off the face of the earth as far as the internet knew. She lost her domain name, apparently, and started a new site, but much like the first, updated it about once a year. I began to despair that much like Claire, Gran had immersed herself in drugs and mystery, and for the first time in my life, began to fret about an author. There is too much complication in Claire to be anything but semi-autobiographal, I thought.

And then rumors started to leak in early 2018 about a new Claire book. I wrote it down, forgot about it, and when it finally hit NetGalley, Dan was kind enough to let me know.

Oh, the book? The book is, quite possibly, the I-Ching, a bound Tarot deck, an astrological guide, or a fortune cookie. Much like City of the Dead, it spoke to me in complex ways that seemed to contain life lessons. I was coming home from a ten-day vacation and had a lot to process. As always, Claire seemed to speak to my soul, but this time, we were both older, both more mature. Claire was fighting bitterness and despair, but she's always done that.

"But age isn't just time passing. It's time breaking you--your will, your heart, your beliefs. Richter's breaks were written in the deep wrinkles in his skin, in his tired posture, in his large, sagging hands."

In this book, Claire is solving the mystery of who is trying to kill her. We also go back in time to follow the case that was supposed to complete her California P.I. license application, and discover the true mystery. Through all of this, much like the prior two books, she's thinking about her two best friends from childhood who are part of her own significant mystery. It is all integrated together quite well, and the mysteries end up being rather intriguing. I'll note that this is absolutely not the place to pick up the mysteries of Claire Dewitt; start with [b:Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead|9231999|Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead|Sara Gran|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312909281s/9231999.jpg|14112168]. While each larger story stands alone, Claire's personal mystery plays a role that is best appreciated through the backstory.

"People wanted to tell you the truth. They just didn't want it to be true, and they didn't know they wanted to tell it."

As always, I highlighted about ten percent of the book, but we'll all have to wait until I get my hands on a hardcover copy to share. I will note that Gran has some very dry humor regarding Los Angeles, is a keen observer of human nature, and has a lot of hard-won wisdom.


Many, many, many thanks to Dan for the heads-up, and to Netgalley and Atria books for an ARC e-book. The quotes are subject to change in the final book, but I think they give a good flavor of Gran's writing.

btw, links to a couple of Gran sites from my Wordpress review: https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/claire-dewitt-and-the-infinite-blackt...… (more)

“‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘Do you really think so?’ Lydia said. ‘Do you really think it’s wonderful?’

Did I really think it was wonderful? Wonderful was probably an exaggeration. I thought it was fine. Maybe even good. I couldn’t say the last time I thought anything was exactly wonderful. This implied more joy than I may ever have felt. But that was what she wanted to hear.’”

***********************

Claire is a mess. A word of advice to those that allow her in their homes–keep your drugs locked up, as she’ll be in the medicine cabinet hunting for Valium and oxycodone as soon as your back is turned. You know Claire. I was friends with her in college. I’m not precisely sure if I love the character, or my memory of the Claire-like friend. Beautiful. Burning with intelligence. Supremely dysfunctional in an utterly honest way. Prone to exploiting and helping those around her in equal amounts. Not with maliciousness, mind you; more an instinctual focus on meeting her own needs, her desperate attempt to fill the holes in her psyche. And yet, despite all those dysfunctional behaviors, it’s heartache for friends to walk away. (Come to think of it, I’m in a Claire-like relationship with a certain book site right now).

Because I'm doing my best to limit dysfunctionality, I'll continue my review--as well as speculation about the author--at
http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/claire-dewitt-and-the-bohemian-highway...
or
http://carols.booklikes.com/post/679753/claire-dewitt-and-dysfunction… (more)