July 9, 2002

• Book Review:

  
  

  Jolie Blon’s Bounce

  
  

  by James Lee Burke

  
  

  Simon & Schuster, 2002

  
  

  Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the sheriff’s department in New Iberia, Louisiana.  He has been one of my favorite fictional cops for years and years.  The little girl he adopted, after he pulled her out of a wrecked airplane under the waters of a swamp, is now grown and ready for college.  I’ve loved Dave all this time, through at least half a dozen books.

  
  

  As Burke draws him, “Streak” Robicheaux is a man I can admire.  Most of the time, he keeps his anger and his inner demons in check.  When the control slips, though, is often when the stories get really intense and fascinating.  I was well into the climax last night and trying hard to finish the book, but I nodded off a couple of times and had to put it down.  This morning, I tried to finish it before breakfast, but starved out and ended up grabbing a quick bite and diving back into the book.

  
  

  Of all the books in this series, Jolie Blon’s Bounce is the only one with so much sheer weirdness, supernatural shivery stuff.  One of its bad guys is about as evil as they come, and the rest aren’t anything to poke fun at, either.

  
  

  Early in the book, Dave muses:

  
  

  
  

  When we are injured emotionally or systematically humiliated or made to feel base about ourselves in our youth, we are seldom given the opportunity later to confront our persecutors on equal terms and to show them up for the cowards they are.  So we often create a surrogate scenario in which the vices of our tormentors, the fears that fed their cruelty, the self-loathing that drove them to hurt the innocent, eventually consume them and make the worthy of pity and in effect drive them from our lives.

  
  

  But sometimes the dark fate that should have been theirs just does not shake properly out of the box.

  
  

  I know this.  I’ve imagined my tormentors’ comeuppance many times and have sometimes encountered them later and found them apparently untouched by the harm they’d visited on others.  Real life is often unfair, and good fiction reflects that.

  
  

  Later on, this very fallible hero says, “…the worst deeds human beings commit are precipitated by a happenstance meeting of individuals and events, who and which, if they were rearranged only slightly, would never leave a bump in our history.”  So true!

  
  

  And I’m right there in emphatic agreement with him when he thinks, “God bless all reference librarians everywhere.”

  
  

  One more quote I can’t resist sharing–Sigmund Freud is supposed to have said:  “Ah, thank you for showing me all of mankind’s lofty ideals.  Now let me introduce you to the basement.”   There is a lot of that subterranean material here.

  
  

  In my anything but humble opinion, the only thing wrong with this book is the fault of spell-check, one of the worst things to befall writing and publishing since the beginning of time.  One example:  “peeling” where it should have said, “pealing”.  These are things any competent human proofreader can deal with.  I’d wager that Burke originally typed it correctly and the mindless robotic proofer changed it to a more common, but in this case quite incorrect, word.  I find instances of this all the time.  Isn’t it interesting that these innovations supposed to improve the readability of prose end up making it worse?

  
  

  READ THIS BOOK, anyway.

  • 6:46 pm
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