The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie

 

In the library, this probably seemed to me like an interesting crime novel; it's much more than that. Currie's authorial voice sparkles and dances and laughs, even as the people in the novel are fighting and suffering and breaking and dying. It's a remarkably grim novel--Babs Dionne dies hard, even if the narrative of it ends before the event, and the setting is remarkably grimy in a badly-governed small-town way (probably because it's a badly governed small town). The characters are mostly doing the best they can, the ones that aren't tend to die less well--less easily, less meaningfully--than the rest, and all of them seem like themselves. There's a touch of magic realism around the edges, one of the POV characters can apparently see and communicate with the spirits of the departed, but much of the novel reads as depressingly plausible. The novel begins with almost a recitation of an ancestry, it ends with something like hope. It's a starkly beautiful novel.