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Washington Insider | George Pelecanos displays his knowledge of the D.C streets once again in The Turnaround

THE TURNAROUND
By George Pelecanos. Little, Brown, and Company.
294 pp. $27.99.

Over the last six years, when he wasn’t turning out crime novels, George Pelecanos also wrote scripts for the HBO series The Wire. The show’s creator, David Simon, would traditionally assign Pelecanos the penultimate episode of each season—and season after season, Pelecanos would proceed to rip viewers’ guts out.

It was Pelecanos who wrote the episode in Season One where Bodie and Poot killed Wallace; he killed off Sobotka in Season Two and bumped off Stringer Bell in Season Three; in Season Four, he orchestrated that agonizing scene where Sgt. Carver walks down that long, long corridor and abandons little Randy to an indifferent social services system, and in Season Five, he showed cheerful, unlucky Dukie walking down an alley into a life of poverty and probable drug addiction. TV critic Alan Sepinwall said it best: “Fucking George Pelecanos. Why do I let him stomp on my heart time after time?”

Pelecanos’ new novel The Turnaround is a pleasant change of pace in that it actually has a fairly happy ending. But the characters sure have to experience a lot of misery to get there.

The story begins in 1972 in Washington, D.C. It’s summertime, the weather is hot, the blacks don’t like the whites as well as the reverse, the streets are lively and a little bit dangerous at night, and classic rock and funk tracks are pouring out of everyone’s stereos.

 On this particular night, the lives of six young people will violently converge: three white teens driving a stolen car through a black neighbourhood and three black kids on the sidewalk. The white kids hurl a few racial epithets out the window and speed off... straight into a dead end. By the time they try driving back the way they came, a mob has gathered, and they’re out for blood. When the smoke clears, one of the white kids is dead, and one of the black kids winds up in jail.

But even the survivors bear the scars of the incident—literally so, in the case of Alex Pappas, who was beaten badly enough to lose an eye. Pelecanos picks up the story 35 years after that fateful night, with Alex now running his father’s restaurant and two of the black kids looking for closure, each in their own way. Raymond Monroe, who now works as a physical therapist at Walter Reed Medical Center, has a chance encounter with Alex and cautiously approaches him, groping sincerely to achieve some kind of reconciliation. Charles Baker, on the other hand, is a sociopathic career criminal who hopes to shake down Peter Whitten, the other white survivor (now a prominent civil rights lawyer), for some easy blackmail money. In other words, that fateful incident back in 1972 is still the central fact of these men’s lives. In Pelecanos’ world, the past isn’t something you ever leave behind — you always reach a turnaround that forces you to back up and drive through it again. And the second time through is usually much, much harder.

For me, though, the main source of pleasure in The Turnaround isn’t its crime-thriller plot, however well-turned it may be. Instead, it’s Pelecanos’ journalistic eye for detail and his ear for tangy dialogue that give every scene, now matter how mundane its content, the air of freshly observed truth. I especially loved the scenes in Alex’s restaurant, Pappas and Sons, which are full of practical details about how a business like this operates, from the compromises that Alex has to make with his mostly Latino staff over what station on the satellite radio to tune into, to the trick of tearing off the cash register tape at 3 p.m. so that the business can pocket a little extra money that the taxman won’t know about. Pelecanos’ depiction of the proud tradition of Pappas and Sons occasionally verges on sentimentality, but it’s sentimentality bolstered by a sincere respect for the hard work that goes into keeping a small family business afloat.

Turning out books as good as The Turnaround is hard work too. Thankfully, reading them is easy.