A Novel of 1918 New Orleans, With Murder and All That Jazz

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/books/review/nathaniel-rich-king-zeno.html

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KING ZENO By Nathaniel Rich386 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

A street preacher, perhaps the most minor of characters in Nathaniel Rich’s ambitious and metaphorically dense third novel, “King Zeno,” hangs moralistic signs on the back of his church wagon. One is about John Barleycorn. Another — we’re in New Orleans in 1918 — reads, “JAZZ KILLS.” This is a tiny, atmospheric touch, viewed through the window of a police captain’s office while prominent characters discuss an investigation into serial ax murders, but like nearly every detail in this novel of digging and questing, it has figurative resonance. The novel makes clear that jazz does indeed kill — not by its decadence, as the proselytist suggests, but by its novelty, its ingenuity. Jazz kills the old art forms, rag and swing. Jazz enacts violence on a song — one band is shown “teasing apart the ‘Tiger Rag’ like an old sweater until it unraveled into something unrecognizable and frightening.” And jazz assaults the listener — “Slaughter me dead!” one audience member screams during a show. In its diabolical innovation jazz is dangerous, and as such it is an ideal subject for a novel that roils with the inseparable energies of creation and destruction.

Jazz is but one of numerous intricate subjects that Rich admits into the novel. Others include World War I, the Spanish flu epidemic, serial murder, police procedures, race relations, the New Orleans Mafia, and the construction of the Industrial Canal, which links Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River (and whose catastrophic breach during Hurricane Katrina looms meaningfully over the book: PROGRESS KILLS). Rich, a resident of New Orleans, throws his arms wide open to history and to the city, and “King Zeno,” particularly in its first half, is as unruly and laterally active as a big urban novel ought to be. And the novel, like a city, somehow coheres, as Rich never loses control of the riotous raw material. The close third-person point of view rotates among three central figures, providing pattern and the promise of convergence; the mysterious ax murders serve as a narrative through-line; the canal exerts centripetal and allegorical force; and the extraordinary American yearning of the characters, as in Stephen Millhauser’s “Martin Dressler” or E. L. Doctorow’s “The Waterworks,” is a constantly propulsive force.

Despite his large canvas, Rich is a gifted portraitist of his three main characters. One is William Bastrop, a detective in the New Orleans Police Department who is haunted by recent experiences in the war. Bastrop has not been forthright to his wife, Maisie, nor to himself, about what happened in a besieged dugout in France, where many of his fellow soldiers died. One of the ghosts from his past turns out to be real — an eye-patched, trench-coated fellow soldier seeking revenge for Bastrop’s cowardice — and Bastrop must escape harm and then confront his own trauma and fraudulence. Maisie (or Maze), after learning the truth about France, moves out. To save his marriage and to regain a sense of purpose and integrity, Bastrop decides, roughly midway through the novel, that he must solve the ax murder case. “This was no longer police work, at least not only police work. By solving this unsolvable case, he would solve Maze. He would prove his courage, regain his confidence.” At this point his character achieves velocity and direction — he becomes a dramatic vector, a supersleuth.

The second central character is a Creole musician named Isadore Zeno. Isadore is a startlingly original cornet player who longs to be the king of New Orleans jazz, to make a new music that “would live forever, flowing from one generation to the next down the river of time into the sea of immortality.” But listeners are not quite ready for Isadore’s sound, and he is frustrated by his lack of good gigs. Zeno has a pregnant wife and he needs steady work. He dabbles in armed robbery, but ultimately goes straight, working as a canal digger and a cooper. For a time he forsakes the cornet, but eventually he resolves, roughly midway through the novel, to be both a family man and a jazzman. (As the son of a trumpet player, I was perhaps inordinately curious about how Zeno achieves and maintains his brilliance without seeming to practice.) When the hysteria surrounding the Axman gives Zeno an odd opportunity to take the stage, he very creatively capitalizes on the widespread fear. This daring and desperate move — somewhat convenient, dramatically speaking — furthers Zeno’s music career, and also puts him on a dangerous course toward both the Axman and Bastrop.

The third character is Beatrice Vizzini, a Mafia matriarch, widow and mother. Her company, Hercules Construction, is in charge of excavating the canal, and Beatrice hopes that this respectable, high-profile venture will lead her out of the “shadow business” of racketeering. Like Zeno, she is obsessed with immortality; she takes baths in potions designed to prolong life. (Immortality baths, by the way, do not work.) Beatrice becomes progressively agitated by the ticking of her enormous grandfather clock, by the canal project — where workers have begun finding severed body parts — and by her colossal son, Giorgio, whose behavior has become increasingly sinister and secretive as he tries to prove himself worthy of inheriting the dark family business. Having done what she can to spur the incompetent and lazy Giorgio into professional action, Beatrice eventually loses control of him altogether. She then becomes a detective, investigating her own son.

Thus all three characters are in compelling motion, propelled by deeply rooted desires, as well as by the exigencies of plot. The Spanish flu, meanwhile, is ravaging the city, countervailing the vibrant, creative forces of music and public works, the striving, the dreams of longevity. This is a novel with a high body count, but it has far too much energy ever to feel morbid.

The canal, connecting lake to river, also connects these three characters, as does the murder investigation. (“King Zeno” is not properly a whodunit — readers know the identity of the Axman long before Bastrop does.) All three characters converge, as I suppose they must, in a final climactic scene, Rich’s complex and capacious universe narrowing to a pair of coordinates, lit by the headlights of the vehicles that brought them all there. This scene feels cinematic in all the best and worst ways. There are weapons and blood, there is a riposte that no screenwriter or script doctor could improve. The resolution is exciting and tense, and yet after all of the novel’s artful chaos, it feels like a diminution. Rich delivers what the structure promises — that is the good news and the bad.

Novels expand, then contract. The contraction is compulsory, the application of narrative form on the messy and entropic world the novel is attempting to represent. Elegant contrivance is necessary in the novel, and it has its own pleasures; yet I’ve always been a fan of the accretion phase. When I think of “The Great Gatsby” — another Jazz Age tale — I think of that puppy at Tom and Myrtle’s apartment, or Daisy crying about Gatsby’s shirts, or the mysterious energy in the list of attendees at Gatsby’s parties. It’s always a mild surprise to remember that the novel culminates in vehicular manslaughter and a murder-suicide. Mistaken identity, jealous husband, poolside gunfire. Narrative kills.