Salvation Boulevard
For some time now, I have been an evangelist for Larry Beinhart. I’ve walked into bookstores to introduce myself, and wound up pitching his books. The conversation usually starts on the subject of political satire and who actually writes them anymore. Christopher Buckley’s name is usually mentioned, and then I say something like, “but, who I really like is Larry Beinhart,” which is grammatically incorrect but conveys my message. If the bookseller is young or inexperienced, the response is usually: “Who is he?”
If you’ve heard about Larry Beinhart, it’s probably because he wrote the novel American Hero, which served as inspiration for the film Wag the Dog (one of the few modern political satires with which most people seem to be familiar). Beinhart started his career writing mystery novels, and his 1996 guide to the genre entitled How to Write a Mystery, is a useful and highly readable book.
His more recent novels, American Hero, The Librarian, and now Salvation Boulevard mix politics and elements of mystery, borrowing heavily from mystery’s close cousin: the film noir. These books feature detective-type characters going up against powerful, sinister, and shadowy organizations. There are conspiracies to uncover and femme fatales to complicate the journey. Beinhart sets these dark dangerous tales in worlds of political and moral upheaval, using plots ripped from the newspaper stories that never made the front page, the articles you probably didn’t bother to read but should have.
Beinhart is a champion of these lost newspaper stories, and has also written a wonderful non-fiction book on what he calls “fog facts”: facts that are out in the public record but invisible to most of us, like water droplets on a foggy day (Example: Al Gore actually did win more votes than Bush in Florida). Beinhart has an uncanny ability to get to the crux of a complicated political issue and explain it in a way that strips away all pretense and spin. In Fog Facts and his editorializing on the Huffington Post, Beinhart is an illuminator and provocateur.
But now to his latest work of fiction: Salvation Boulevard. I liked it. It is a straight ahead thriller, more serious in tone than the freewheeling farcical Librarian (my favorite Beinhart novel), and I will confess, I sort of missed the funny stuff. Salvation Boulevard is the story of Carl Van Wagener, a born-again Christian detective investigating the murder of an atheist college professor. A Muslim student has confessed to the killing, and Carl’s mega-church is pressuring him to drop the case. But Carl soon discovers there is more to this murder than meets the eye.
This is a fast read, but it did take a little while to win me over. The book begins by setting up the imprisonment of a Muslim student named Ahmad and introducing us to his liberal Jewish defense attorney and Carl, the born-again P.I. We read that Ahmad has been tortured and we immediately draw parallels to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, etc. Here’s where I had a little trouble. Despite Beinhart’s sharp prose, these first few chapters felt black and white to me, setting up a moral conflict that seemed predictable and a protagonist who seemed to lack nuance. As I read those first few chapters, I thought of all those anti-war movies that came out in the fall of 2007; you know, the ones with those ”serious” messages that were easy to understand just from watching the previews.
Fortunately, things soon become more interesting. The focus shifts from Ahmad, the accused, to Nathaniel MacLeod, the dead philosophy professor, and his theological rival Rev. Paul Plowright, head of the Church of the Third Millenium. I don’t want to say too much about how this plot unfolds because I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say this: the book becomes very hard put down. The morality becomes more ambiguous, the pace quickens, and the plot goes in a direction I was not originally expecting. I breezed through the last half of the book in a couple days.
Salvation Boulevard is a story about faith, religion, and hypocrisy, and like most of Beinhart’s recent work, it is inspired by real life events. His author’s note will send a chill up your spine when you realize just how true to life it is. Salvation Boulevard is not my favorite Beinhart novel and these characters are not his deepest, but it is still a highly enjoyable read: smart, fast-paced and thought provoking.
Do I recommend it? Yes. But whether or not you think Salvation Boulevard is your kind of book, I do hope you take away one thing from this post: if you’ve never read Larry Beinhart before, you are missing out. The man is a brilliant witer and a personal hero of mine. So go online, read an article or two, and check out one of his books. You will not be disappointed.
(fyi … if you are a huge Wag the Dog fan and want to check out the book version, be forewarned, it is totally different from the film it inspired. Both versions are worth checking out, both maintain a similar spirit–but the tone, characters, and pretty much the whole plot are completely different.)
