What’s funny is that there’s a decent chance you’ve watched more George Pelecanos writing than you’ve ever read (the guy was one of the writers for The Wire). And if you have watched The Wire, you know the series’s arc is as thick and rich and inbent as any novel (ar, at least, as any novel by Dennis Lehane, Richard Price or Pelecanos, ¾ of the show’s writers)(David Simon, the show’s creator, is the fourth, and his The Corner looks awesome, and I’m sure it’s great, I just haven’t gotten to it).
Which is why reading Pelecanos (or Price, or Lehane) causes, post-Wire, a sort of strange sensation, maybe like watching your favorite baseball player playing for a new team. Pelecanos’ new novel, The Way Home, is just crazily good in all the satisfying ways you want from a crime/mystery novel (the cover blurb, at least on the ARC, correctly points out that the trio of Lehan/Price/Pelecanos are pushing “the boundaries of crime writing into literary territory.”).
What’s coolest about this book—and the reason it’s pushing boundaries—is because it’s equally fun and engaging to read as a what-comes-next crime/mystery book and as a redemption/character-driven literary work. At the work’s center is Christopher Flynn, a kid who got into trouble as a juvenile, spends time locked up (here’s the automatic idle Q: when you read Price, Lehane, and Pelecanos, do you automatically picture sort of similar places [juvenile detention facilities, for instance] for each of them?), and, eventually, is back in the world, attempting to make his way and working for his dad’s carpet installation company.
And Christopher’s relationship to his dad is what makes this story such a monumentally good read: these are real, complete, complex characters, Christopher and his dad (who, initially-confusingly, is often just called Flynn in the narration, so there’s a headscratching element at the start). More than just complex and complete characters, their relationship is amazingly real and about as true-feeling as any relationship you’re likely to find, crime fiction or literary fiction or whatever. It’s (of course) vital that the plot device (it’s a bag of money; I suppose it’s safe to mention that) shows up while Christopher’s working for his father; it’s equally important that Christopher’s working with an old friend of his from the juvenile detention facility when thing’s start moving.
As in The Wire and his other books, Pelecanos’ The Way Home features messy one-good-vs-another-good moral stuff at work, and while it’d be easy to say the book’s focus is on something maybe reducible to ‘redemption,’ it’s actually more complext than that: what the book’s heart beats for and toward is how we square things, how we view things, and how we try to negotiate the dicey boundary between past and present (and it really does feel like it’s about we when you read the book—it’s hard not to feel resolutely [and, at times, frustratedly and unhappily] wound tight in the heads of the characters [even though it's not first-person]). It’s a great, great read, and it’s going to officially be the Summer Reading Season pretty soon: make The Way Home yr required mystery/crime/literary read.
