The Turnaround

George Pelecanos is an independent-film producer, an essayist, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, a producer and an Emmy-nominated writer on the HBO hit series The Wire, and the author of a bestselling series of novels set in and around Washington, D.C.

*Starred Review* As in Drama City (2005), Pelecanos changes his focus a bit here from those who either commit crimes or attempt to solve them to those whose lives are altered by their proximity to crimes being committed. Alex Pappas is the hardworking owner of a D.C. diner he inherited from his even-harder-working father; Raymond Monroe is a hardworking physical therapist who had to work hardest of all to escape the fate of many of his friends in Montgomery County’s Heathrow Heights. One man is white, the other black; they don’t know one another, but they are linked by an incident that occurred in their teens, a senseless shooting that followed an equally senseless outburst of racial antagonism. Now it’s more than 40 years later, and the two are thrown together again, but this time in an attempt to prevent more violence. Throughout his career, Pelecanos has written again and again of the sense of inevitability that pervades so much inner-city violence: lives running on collision courses, individuals powerless to jump the tracks that poverty, prejudice, and ignorance have set them on. But this time he tells a different story. After starting more lives racing toward one another on those same tracks, he asks, What if we could change course? What if we could reroute our lives? It’s a daring premise, one fraught with the temptations of sentimentality and false hope, but Pelecanos tells this story of tentative reconciliation with the same unrelenting realism and concern for the roundness of his characters that have characterized the bleakest of his novels. Yes, Pelecanos is among our very best crime novelists, but he may become even more renowned for writing fiction about working-class America that is both beyond crime and beyond ideology. --Bill Ott