ANDREW VACHSS – Haiku. Pantheon, hardcover. First Edition: November 2009.

   Haiku, for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, is a form or Japanese poetry consisting of three lines, and notable for its beauty, precision, and simplicity. It is also notable for one other thing that far too many western writers seem incapable of understanding. It doesn’t work very well in English.

   English language haiku tends to be pretentious, portentous, and empty. It misses almost entirely the thing that makes actual haiku haunting and viable. You probably can’t do limericks in Japanese. English haiku has the same problem, it neither scans nor fulfills artistically.

   Now, I’m sure there are some fans of English haiku out there, and some who even write it. I have no problem with that, but don’t fool yourself. It isn’t the same anymore than a 16th century Japanese writer could have written Shakespearean English.

   Some forms of writing are language centric. I’ve read that the remarkable thing about Omar Khayyam is that his quatrains read better in English than in the original Arabic — which is why he is a minor poet in his own language, but a major one in ours.

   Which could be a metaphor for Andrew Vachss’s latest novel. He tries to write in the voice of an Asian character foreign to these shores, and instead he sounds as if he ate some bad fortune cookies and watched too many episodes of Kung Fu.

   Far too many.

   Vachss is a good writer. Once in a while he is very close to a fine writer. While I am not a fan of his Burke books over all — for me they there is an element of exploitation to them — I recognize and applaud the white hot passion Vachss brings to his books, the almost Spillane-like conviction and power, but married to a more controlled and carefully crafted prose.

   In addition I will state flatly and offer no defense in saying I think his novel Two Trains Running, a stand-alone novel, is one of the best crime novels of the last thirty years, one of the best since Hammett’s The Glass Key. Find it, read it. Admire it. It is simply a fine crime novel that repays multiple readings.

   But skip Haiku unless you are a die-hard Vachss fan. And maybe even if you are.

   The incredibly contrived and strained plot of this short novel deals with a group of burned out street people who join together on an epic quest that will reveal and redeem them, if they survive it…

   Ho, the narrator, is a sensei seeking redemption, Michael is a gambling addict, Ranger a spaced out Vietnam vet, Lamont a street gang leader turned poet and burned out on alcohol, and Brewster an obsessive pulp collector who sets them all in motion when the deserted building where he hides his treasures is scheduled for destruction.

   Following a mysterious woman in a white Rolls Royce Michael conceives a plan to blackmail her if he can find her. He recruits the others to track her down and in the meanwhile they also find themselves seeking a new home for Brewster’s beloved collection.

   The plot practically drips with the foreshadowing of depth and importance. Metaphor hangs over it like big city smog.

   Unfortunately none of the people in the book are really characters — they are metaphors for Vachss message about community and heroes, and the nobility of man in even the most desperate of situations.

   All very admirable, but not very entertaining. On top of which he insists on telling us all this in Ho’s strained and false voice, rather than letting any of it develop from his plot or his character’s actions. Rather than trust his readers to get his point he drives every point in like a nail with a nail gun.

   Unsubtle writers really shouldn’t try for subtlety. Vachss is at his best when he is in your face, at his most subtle when he isn’t trying to be subtle at all. Here he seems to be trying to somehow hammer home subtly. As you can imagine that’s not very successful.

   Having a writer virtually shouting at you how important and deep his work is may not be the best strategy for entertainment. It’s not a particularly good one for art either. Art should speak for itself just as entertainment should. It’s never a good idea for your narrator to keep telling the reader how important what he is saying is.

   The problem isn’t the plot, or the characters. They aren’t far from the street people in many of Vachss’s well-drawn books. The problem is the incredibly heavy-handed second-hand Kung Fu narration of Ho, Vachss’s narrator.

   In Michael’s obsessed and possessed consciousness, there is no room for morality, He is capable of highly complex thoughts, but all his thinking is reserved for the computation of odds. He has been waiting for the one bet he can’t lose, that “mortal lock” for many years. With each passing season his connection to reality grows more frayed.

   214 pages of this is a lot to put up with. It’s like reading a novel length essay by a talented but unenlightened college sophomore who has just discovered Proust or Henry James. You appreciate his finer sensibilities, but you would give anything if he could write a simple declarative sentence.

   Mostly Haiku reads like a really pretentious and slightly self-referential graphic novel without pictures, or a really bad film script. You can almost hear the strained and overdone prose voice over long shots of mean streets. Unfortunately Haiku isn’t a graphic novel or a film, but an actual novel.

   Ironically the Batman novel Vachss wrote was considerably better written than this and a much better read.

   This is the kind of book where people have a “lupine grin” rather than a wolfish one, or a “palpable odor of fear” rather than the stench of fear. Ho seems determined to say everything in the most strained and pretentious voice imaginable.

   We would all have been better served if Vachss lost his Thesaurus. Vocabulary is not always a virtue in a writer’s toolbox. Words can get in the way as well as illuminate. In attempting Ho’s voice Vachss divorces himself from everything that gives his work its power and its strength.

   Ho removes Vachss from the street and the street people he writes so well about. It’s as if Raymond Chandler had tried to strain Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles through Christopher Marlowe’s voice. Ho is so noble and philosophical that he never takes on a human face despite the tragedy and guilt that drives his actions. If you can get past him you might enjoy this. I couldn’t.

   I suppose the business about saving Brewster’s library of pulps and paperbacks is supposed to have some deeper meaning about preserving our culture, and how popular literature sometimes speaks to a truer portrait of the real America than finer literary works, but all I could think was I would rather be reading any one of the books in Brewster’s collection than this.

   Vachss is a much better writer than this. But he is not an artist, he’s a storyteller. He is capable of telling moving and even important stories, but popular literature and literature are not the same thing, and that is not a put down. He is capable of drawing painfully sharp portraits of the streets and the people who haunt them. Even here when he gets away from Ho and his borrowed voice he once in a while taps into that — but not often enough to redeem the book.

   Why Vachss felt he had to write this I can only guess, and won’t speculate here. He had enough sense to keep it short though, and I suspect he must know this isn’t his best work.

   At one point he describes a character: “If anything he looked like a man standing in the shade of a tree who could not understand why this gave him no relief from the sun.” The reader can surely sympathize, wondering why this novel is giving him no entertainment and no relief from Ho’s strained narration.

   Vachss can write well, powerfully, but here he proves he can also overreach. It won’t hurt his reputation. His loyal and passionate fans will praise it, and he’ll go back to what he does so well with no harm done, save to readers who expect a certain level of competence and entertainment from his work.

   But unless you are one of those die hard fans give this one a pass. Rent the first season of Kung Fu on DVD instead. At least the overdone pseudo Taoism of Caine and his Master has the charm of a certain camp sensibility. Vachss is all too obviously sincere, which is a shame, because this same plot would have worked as a comic novel ala Donald Westlake or much of Elmore Leonard.

   God only knows, this one could use a few laughs.

   Skip this one and spend the money on his Two Trains Running, a book that really is a work of genuine art and skill, a top flight crime writer at the very height of his ability and craft. That’s the real McCoy. That’s Vachss at his best and most representative.

   Listening to Ho’s false and pretentious voice isn’t a good deal more comfortable than being cornered by an actual street person. Instead of pity and compassion, all you feel is the need to escape. Luckily that can be done by simply closing the book. Or not picking it up in the first place.