"Can’t we all get along?"

By Donald Pfarrer

MS In a Bottle

272 pages ISBN 096675400X $12.00

|Reviewed by Warner Berthoff

The adjustable bromide- that no good novel-writing voice will ever be wholly lost- is on shaky foundations these days, as independent house editors of reliable judgment dwindle down to a beleaguered remnant. Unless sales approaching blockbuster levels are in prospect, even well-established, well-reviewed authors are at risk with new work, and find themselves abruptly deprived of the support, the promotional outlays, they began with.

Three particular cases come promptly to this reviewer’s mind. The novels of Boston’s own Michael Downing grow steadily more assured and appealing, but Simon and Schuster, Downing’s original publisher is no longer interested. Viking Press, which thought well enough of Frank Bergon’s West-based, semi-documentary Shoshone Mike to stake the author to an extended reading tour, turned its back on that first book’s more directly topical and inventive successors, now handled by the regionally loyal University of Nevada Press. And, hardest to figure, Grove Press, original American imprint of the increasingly well-regarded British author Tim Parks, dropped Parks even after the strong sales of his Italian Neighbors, precisely at the moment his novels began showing up on Booker prize short lists and he emerged as a regular contributor to both The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

So it was no surprise, recently, that as engaging a novel as Larry Duberstein’s The Handsome Sailor, with Herman Melville as its eminently marketable protagonist, was published by a little known Sag Harbor, Long Island press (one affiliated, appropriately, with an outfit called the "Second Chance Press"). And no surprise, now, that Donald Pfarrer’s Temple and Shipman, built around a plot situation of intense public interest and concern, should come forth under the imprint of a press located, it appears, on a Cambridge, Massachusetts side street. Again, not a first book: Pfarrer’s Vietnam novel, Neverlight, had earlier won high marks from no less exacting a critic than Paul Fussell, who rated it "one of the finest novels about war I’ve ever read, and that includes A Farewell to Arms, etc."

Jeffrey Temple, a white police patrolman, and John Shipman, a black tavern keeper and irregular inner-city entrepreneur, are the matched protagonists of Donald Pfarrer’s powerful new novel. Each lives, we discover, by a code that, in the circumstances of life on the race-blighted margins of a contemporary midwestern gritty city, makes at one and the same time for a saving degree of self-respect and a heightened likelihood of personal calamity. The triggering event in the narrative is the late-night killing by three white officers, on the lookout for a rape suspect, of a young black man who happens to be Shipman’s son. But Hawk, John Shipman, Jr., is no street bum. College-trained, intellectually ambitious, self-dramatizing as he walks along - to the point of arousing the suspicion of the police patrol - he is determined to break through his father’s accommodations and compromises, successful as they have been, and to thrust his blackness square in society’s face; he will write the true and definitive history of race in America and, as he puts it, burn his own unyielding character into the national memory.

Stopped by the white patrol, he bears for a time the grossly racist harassment and humiliation two of the officers ritually subject him to; Temple, conspicuously, does not join the others in their slurs and taunts but begins telling them this isn’t the guy they want. But when a strip search is threatened and handcuffs flash out, Hawk breaks and, though slight of build, strikes out with damaging force at his two tormentors. At which point the muscular, heavy-set Temple instinctively explodes. He sees only "this crazy black shit beating on cops" and with trained precision slugs the boy into unconsciousness; the other two pile on blows and kicks, and in a matter of seconds the life drains out of him.

This is the shocking moment – it comes early, in the third of the novel’s thirty chapters – from which the story’s defining tension and conflict develop, moving inexorably to its violent denouement, a climax not impossible to foresee but barely endurable when it comes. Besides breaking, at high risk to himself, with the police station culture and code of silence that would allow his cohorts to turn the killing into an act of justifiable self-defense, Temple must deal with his own conscience, the private code of justice and truth by which he has tried to discipline a breakaway temper. And Shipman, turning away from a lifetime of careful, materially advantageous adjustment to the conditions of American racism, can think only of direct, murderous revenge.

How all this comes to pass, and how others are drawn in – Temple’s young son, Shipman’s deeply religious wife, a reality-haunted deputy D.A. – readers may find out for themselves; it’s not for a reviewer to give away plot details. The story, as told, is as compelling as it is painful, and directly pertinent to some of our most agonizing and intractable public concerns. In its narrative propulsion and emotional power it begs for dramatization and indeed has caught the attention of the independent Boston film-maker Roberto Mighty, now seeking funding for a movie version. But what carries the novel is not merely a strong story line. Andre Gide, making notes toward composition of his great Faux-Monnayeurs, wrote that the first requirement "is to establish the field of action…a space upon which to erect the narrative." And the ground strength of Temple and Shipman is its author’s command of its inner-city, back-street tavern, police-dominated setting. Donald Pfarrer knows his woebegone, half-abandoned mill towns of upper New England and New York State. And except perhaps for the racist rogue cop, Hawk’s prime tormentor, who is the novel’s one out-and-out villain – not that he lacks his own kind of authenticity – Pfarrer’s characters on both sides of the divide are presented with the same acute and even-handed grasp of motive and private sensibility that Frank Bergon brought to both outlaw and obsessed pursuer in his wilderness novel, Wild Game.

In its unflinching truthfulness about inner-city violence, the flawed operations of the law, and the bleak prospect of any orderly amelioration, Temple and Shipman (as Robert Mighty has remarked) offers to Rodney King’s memorable question, "Can’t we all get along?" a grimly skeptical response, token of its essential honesty of witness. This is a novel that well deserves a wider audience and a prolonged season of involved attention.