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Nothing Lost - Hardcover

Dunne, John Gregory

 
9781400041435: Nothing Lost
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400041430 ISBN 13: 9781400041435
Verlag: Knopf, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

From one of America’s most celebrated writers—an incandescent love story set in a small American town overtaken by the celebrity machine that comes to feast on a big-time criminal trial.

In the town of Regent, a lurid murder becomes a magnet for the media, the best and worst of the local courtroom powers, and a rich cast of hangers-on. There is Teresa Kean, the advocacy lawyer whose life is charged by a mysterious secret; J.J. McClure, the prosecutor who contemplates his own secrets under the radar screen of Poppy, his glamorous, funny, right-wing congresswoman wife. There is Max Cline, a tough gay former state’s attorney, once J.J.’s boss and now a marginalized defense counsel. There is the sociopathic seventeen-year-old Carlyle, half sister of the accused, a supermodel whose addiction is attention—no matter the cost. And—as if it were a character itself—there is the reckless passion that will fulfill a self-destructive destiny for one of the players.

Dunne’s fascination with “the population of the forgotten, the rejected, and the left behind” in the emptiness of the American heartland is the foundation of a story that takes us through the inner workings of the media, the prisons, the courts, and politics. Unsentimental, surprising—deeply sad and darkly funny—Nothing Lost is Dunne’s finest and last novel.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Gregory Dunne wrote five other novels—Vegas; True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue; and Playland—and seven works of nonfiction, among which are the memoir-like Harp and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Princeton in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, the writer Joan Didion, on many screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003.

Aus dem Klappentext

From one of America s most celebrated writers an incandescent love story set in a small American town overtaken by the celebrity machine that comes to feast on a big-time criminal trial.

In the town of Regent, a lurid murder becomes a magnet for the media, the best and worst of the local courtroom powers, and a rich cast of hangers-on. There is Teresa Kean, the advocacy lawyer whose life is charged by a mysterious secret; J.J. McClure, the prosecutor who contemplates his own secrets under the radar screen of Poppy, his glamorous, funny, right-wing congresswoman wife. There is Max Cline, a tough gay former state s attorney, once J.J. s boss and now a marginalized defense counsel. There is the sociopathic seventeen-year-old Carlyle, half sister of the accused, a supermodel whose addiction is attention no matter the cost. And as if it were a character itself there is the reckless passion that will fulfill a self-destructive destiny for one of the players.

Dunne s fascination with the population of the forgotten, the rejected, and the left behind in the emptiness of the American heartland is the foundation of a story that takes us through the inner workings of the media, the prisons, the courts, and politics. Unsentimental, surprising deeply sad and darkly funny Nothing Lost is Dunne s finest and last novel.

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CHAPTER ONE

That is the end of the story.

Or almost the end.

I’m not sure I’m the one who should be telling it, but if I don’t, nobody will, so what the hell.

We live in a litigious time, and as I do not wish to be the focus of any litigation, I’ve located the major events of what follows in a state I call South Midland. By its name you can intuit a couple of things. Midland suggests the middle of the country, that part grandiosely identified as the Great Plains. South Midland suggests that there is a North Midland, as indeed there is. North Midlanders proudly claim to have the largest Paul Bunyan statue in the world, and perhaps they do, since to the best of my knowledge there are no other claimants. With that highly developed sense of humor we all recognize as indigenous to the Great Plains, South Midlanders say that the best thing in North Midland is Interstate 90 leading to South Midland. People in North Midland often group the two states together as Midlandia, but people in South Midland never do.

The biggest city in South Midland is Kiowa, which of course is Indian or, as we now say, Native American. When traveling out of state, Kiowans often refer to Kiowa as the Chicago of the north-central states. I have never heard a Chicagoan refer to his home as the Kiowa of the Midwest. Our state capital is called, with the imagination we also know as indigenous to the Great Plains, Capital City, usually shortened to Cap City. The University of South Midland, whose main campus is located in Cap City, has never had a Nobel laureate, but its football team has been the national champion three times in the last eight years, and its coach, Dr. John Strong, has been on the cover of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, and Sports Illustrated (three times, twice as he was doused with Gatorade by his team and assistant coaches after a victory); the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal has even floated his name as a future Republican vice-presidential candidate because of his devotion both to winning and to American ideals. All the university sports teams are named the Rhinos, although there is no palaeontological evidence that herds of rhinoceroses ever roamed the empty vistas of the Great Plains.





I teach a night school course in criminal law at Osceola County Community College in Cap City, and at the first class meeting each semester I tell my students that when I open the Kiowa Times-Ledger and the Capital City Herald every morning, I turn first to the obituary page. In an obit, I say, the spaces between the lines tell all. What is omitted is often more interesting than what is said. Example, from yesterday’s Herald, the deceased, a forty-nine-year-old professor of agronomy at the university, unknown to me, killed by a hit-and-run driver in a Kmart parking lot; said driver, just turned fifteen and without a license, apprehended two blocks from the accident site after blindsiding a brand-new Volvo SUV on a pre-purchase trial spin: “He is survived by his second wife, from whom he was recently divorced, and by a stepson from his first marriage.” Think of the moral and sexual misdemeanors woven into that simple sentence, the mosaic of small, mean betrayals. The mind has difficulty entertaining all the agronomist’s sins and discontents, mortal and venial, the permutations and possibilities of discarded and discarding spouses. And that is before we consider the teenage jerkoff who thought the Kmart parking lot was the Talledega Superspeedway.

Then, to reinforce my point, I drop in Henry James. Although in the academic slum where Osceola Community is resident, The Golden Bowl is not exactly required reading. (Due diligence requires me to admit that I never actually finished it—I was bored by the Ververs—but I did see the movie and thought the actor who played Prince Amerigo not unattractive.) Anyway, James once wrote in an essay I saw quoted on the Net that the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern—that constitutes experience.

Henry James, I tell them, would have made a great criminal attorney. That would no doubt send him spinning in his grave, and it makes those of my students who know who he was (four, perhaps five, no more) laugh nervously.

I know most of the principals in the story I am about to tell, and a number of the walk-ons as well. I am even, as you will find out soon enough, a minor character. Some of the carnage that ensued I witnessed. Some of it was told to me. On the record, off the record, who cares now? Some of the principals did not realize they were telling me. Sealed audiotapes. Film, as in “Film at 11.” I went to the printed record, voluminous if you know where to look. Court transcripts. Discussions in chambers with a court reporter present. Proceedings of the South Midland Bar Association. Testimony before the Judiciary Committee of the State Legislature. Interviews in the legal journals.

I broke an Internet password. Read the spaces between the lines. Traced the implication of things. Guessed the unseen from the seen. Judged the whole piece by the pattern. Surmised. Triangulated. Extrapolated.

Anything that passed through my filter carries my shadows, my impri- matur. As fact, it might be suspect, but as truth it is as close as I can get. If you were the filter, your facts, or your memory of them, might be equally suspect, but the truth, presupposing your honesty, or as close as you could get to it.

But you weren’t there, and I was, so fuck off.

I think I got it right.

Mostly.

And if I didn’t, it’s the available version.





Of course it began with Edgar Parlance.

His death, and the obscene brutality of it, immediately captured the headlines and the newsbreaks of the gluttonous 24/7 news cycle, searching as always for the correct and visually gratifying metaphor to validate the American experience, or, better yet, to provide a dark parable about that same experience. It is my own feeling that life began going downhill with “You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.” I think I would have preferred to live in the age of the pony express, allowing as it did, I would like to think, a time for contemplation before action was deemed necessary. 24/7, plus the transitory involvement of a president looking for a way to act presidential as the second term of his forgettable administration was winding down to its unlamented conclusion, gave Edgar Parlance’s murder the push it needed to become a major media event, bringing with it the usual suspects, talking heads prattling about race hatred and the phenomenon of what they insisted on calling “Terror in the Heartland.” It was a heartland that existed only in their fevered imaginations, neighborly values and small-town ways, stoked not by reality but by Oscar Hammerstein, we know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand. Crap, of course. This land was fertilized with blood. Jesse and Frank James, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, killers all, sanitized into public darlings by Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

Dixon McCall didn’t mention Jesse or Frank, Bonnie or Clyde.

PRESIDENT TO ATTEND PARLANCE FUNERAL

Washington, D.C. (cnn 12:42 p.m. edt)—President Dixon McCall will interrupt his Midwestern fundraising trip to attend the funeral of Edgar Parlance, White House deputy press secretary Anita Bowne announced today. Parlance, a 39-year-old African American, was the victim of a brutal race-related torture slaying earlier this week outside the small town of Regent, South Midland.

The President, who has often feuded with civil rights leaders and the...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400041430
ISBN 13 
9781400041435
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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Verantwortliche Person
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