From Publishers Weekly
The last novel of the late Dunne, who died in December 2003, reads rather like a smorgasbord of his previous nonfiction work doused with a heavy sauce of "ripped from the headlines" plotlines. The central narrative, which concerns the trial of Duane Lajoie for the supposedly racially motivated torture and murder of a black man, Edgar Parlance, in a Great Plains state referred to as South Midland, is garnished with observations (like the comment about Midlanders "with 56-inch waists, the product of bad weather, too little exercise, too much television, and too much sugar-saturated junk food") echoing Dunne's famous
New Yorker story about the murder of Brandon Teena in Nebraska. Max Cline is a jaundiced ex-prosecutor-gay, Jewish and unsentimental-hired to be part of Duane Lajoie's defense team. Teresa Kean, Duane's chief attorney, is a former victims' rights advocate. Duane's legal fees are being covered by his half sister, Carlyle, a rich, famous and wildly spoiled model. The trial is an echt-American carnival of media bunkum, with the prosecutor's Ann Coulter-esque wife, Poppy McClure, trying to milk it for political advantage; Carlyle using it as a career booster; Kean and Max trying to manage their over-the-top client; and Max trying to penetrate the cool surface of Kean's demeanor to reveal the secret that animates her. Dunne loads his story with wonderful phrases, but his satire of Midwestern yahoos and the various creepy and cretinous habits of the rich and newsworthy is a bit too dyspeptic to be penetrating. This fast read is a lesser coda to a career rich in better fictions, such as
True Confessions.
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Dunne's shrewd and crafty sixth novel embodies his signature fascinations with murder, racism, the legal system, and four centers of power: Hollywood, Washington, fashion, and sports. The tale's catalyst is the grotesque torture and murder of a black man named Edgar Parlance in a football-obsessed Middle Western state, home of Dunne's smart and acerbic narrator, Max Cline. Jewish and queer (his preferred term), Max was a state prosecutor until his presence became irksome to two conservative Republicans: attorney general Jerrold "The Worm" Wormwold and Congresswoman Poppy McClure, an outrageous sound-bite queen married to Max's former fellow prosecutor, the brooding J. J. So Max is out on his own when the Parlance murder becomes a national cause celebre, and attorney and high-profile victims' rights advocate Teresa Kean comes to town. Newly dismayed by her bizarre and secret past, Teresa shocks everyone by agreeing to defend one of the goons indicted for Parlance's murder at the request of his half-sister, a catastrophically ambitious teenage supermodel. Dunne, a lacerating journalist as well as a satirist, is at his wily best in this masterfully plotted, darkly funny, and blisteringly incisive novel of coercion, revenge, and death, a book, sadly enough, that is being posthumously published due to Dunne's recent sudden death. His insightful, expert, and engaging voice will be sorely missed.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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