THE LIBRARY LIZARD
A VOICE FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Ever since I read "Dutch Shea, Jr.," its author John Gregory Dunne has been tops on my list of writers. He does lowlife felons better than anyone I have ever read, which is surprising given that he comes from a lace-curtain-Irish-Catholic family in Connecticut, went to Princeton, and travels in highbrow literary circles with his wife Joan Didion. His brother, by the way, is novelist and gossip monger Dominick Dunne, whom you've probably seen on TV.

It was like an old family friend was gone, then, when I learned that Dunne had died in December of 2003. But surprise, surprise--he left behind the manuscript for one more novel, "Nothing Lost," which came out last year to such little fanfare that I had never heard of it until I ran across it on the New Books shelf. It was like a voice from the other side.

It's one of Dunne's more difficult novels to read, largely because he jumps around from one viewpoint to another and because his chief narrator is never fully fleshed out. It probably needed a little more work, but I'm too grateful to quibble. Basically, it is the story of a hideous murder and of its effect on everyone who becomes involved in the case. It takes place in a Great Plains state that the narrator calls South Midland, a lagging red-state backwater where the main religion is worship of the college football team "the Rhinos".

The murder victim is a presumably endearing old black man, beaten to death by a couple of vicious young white lowlifes, after first being skinned alive. The case becomes a media sensation when it becomes known that one of the perps is the half-brother of an actress/model teen idol who uses the trial as a publicity stunt. In addition, the prosecutor's wife is a grandstanding congresswoman, a cross between Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, and the chief defense attorney is a woman recently involved in a Washington sex scandal. The case becomes the sort of media circus that is familiar to us all.

I did not get caught up in the lives of the lawyers, the actress, the congresswoman, etc., as much as I did in the passages about the thrill killers Duane and Bryant, their jailhouse cohorts, and Duane's girlfriend Merle Orvis. Dunne turns a pitiless spotlight on this repellent bunch and on the rural wasteland they inhabit.

Take Merle Orvis, for example. We learn that she has a teardrop tattooed under her right eye, had been in and out of juvenile detention since she was twelve, and is a former topless dancer at a bar called Boobs. She lives in a trailer park across the highway from the town dump with her three-year-old son Boy. Here is how Dunne describes the defense lawyers' visit to her home:

"Merle Orvis's trailer was a pigpen of dirty dishes, unemptied wastebaskets, open garbage bags, ashtrays filled to overflowing, and moldy French fries that seemed to be growing out of the sprung couches. Boy had no other name, although occasionally she called him Baby. After Baby was born, she said, she had made arrangements for him to be adopted by what she called a couple of muff divers from San Francisco, but then decided that lesbian parents would not give Boy the kind of upbringing she thought he deserved. . . . Boy wore no clothes and was not yet toilet-trained, although he was almost three. He piddled constantly, and was still being nursed. Titty, he would say to his mother, and Merle Orvis would hoist a flabby breast from under her T-shirt. Boy would line up the nipple and pop it into his mouth, picking his nose and viewing his surroundings as he slurped his mother's milk. Shitty, he would then say, and squat and crap."

How can you not love a book like that?

I suppose I should add that this book is very graphic in some places and is not for the squeamish. And it reveals one detail of homosexual practice I had not heard of, and could have lived happily without knowing.

What, Mom, what????

You'll have to read the book.