Reviews

REVIEWS                                     July 1996   AGENDA  13

True Crime

Salt of the Earth

By Jack Olsen

St. Martin's Press 376 pages, $24.95 hardcover

Reviewed by Jaime Agnew

Owner of Aunt Agatha's

   The once booming genre of True Crime has hit hard times. The number of books sold and titles issued has receded from its 80s high-water, and even talented practitioners like Edna Buchanan and our own local master Lowell Cauffiel are turning to the greener pastures of fiction. It had to happen sometime to a genre that didn't even have a name not that long ago. Blame overexposure - too many "instant" books of meager merit and too many television movies "inspired by real events" (a euphemism for transforming tangy reality into the usual Hollywood pablum).

   But there's life in True Crime yet. Although its most popular author Ann Rule's latest book Dead by Midnight didn't become a hard back best-seller, it is comfortably lodged on the paperback list John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is nothing if not True Crime, and it's been a best-seller for an astonishing 113 weeks. And there will always be hope for excellence as long as Jack Olsen is writing.

   Salt of the Earth, Olsen's latest, continues his string of memorable and innovative True Crime books. ln it Olsen tells the story of a crime in its full context, tracing the life and destiny of an American family for almost a hundred pages before he allows murderous violence to enter. Olsen details not only the act, but the ripples of its effect on the characters we've grown to know, their community, and even on the family of the criminal The result is a deep, profound vision not only of a crime in America, but of America itself.

   Since modem day America grants recognition only to those who have achieved the narrow pinnacle of their professions, or to those who have been the victims or instigators of violent crime (hence O.J.'s quantum fame), a book like Salt of the Earth illuminates lives that are rarely seen on television or in print, people who aren't usually considered people enough to be included in "People." Along with other recent True Crime books, like the less excellent but quite entertaining A Stranger in the Family by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White and All She Wanted by Aphrodite Jones, it's a vision of a social/economic class that's neglected if not scomed. These protagonists look up to Oprah as an intellectual avatar, go to Jazzercize, sleep on waterbeds, are part-time cosmetologists, aspire to mobile home dealerships or good jobs at the nuclear plant, and get picked on at the Kwik Shop in Fatts City or mocked at a barn dance in Humbott.

   It's class snobbery of course - when the unglamorous (i.e. not wealthy) eire examined in books, it's usually with the sort of anthropological, condescending "look how the other half lives" style of "K-Mart realism," reading like dispatches to "New Yorker" readers from writing faculty members who may have once been members of the lumpen. If Salt of the Earth had been written by, say, Joyce Caro) Oates and labeled a novel it would be a shoo-in for a Pulitzer.

   Olsen's focal point, Elaine Gere, is a sort of latter day Mother Courage, indomitably keeping her family and her spirit intact through the wasteland of alienation, violence and addiction she's forced to inhabit. Searching for roots, security and some hope, she moves from place to place around the country until, almost inevitably, fatal disaster finds her.

   The perpetrator, the focus of most True Crime books, is here given the supporting role usually given to the victim. Michael Green emerges as a compelling figure nonetheless, a monster wreathed in marijuana haze and steroid rage, stalking through his Gatsbyish dreams of self-transformation - will he be mean Joe Green, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ted Bundy - the kind of dreams that in America always seem to breed nightmares.

   The flip side of the academie condescension toward the"common" people is the tabloid sin of sentimentality, but Olsen draws a clear middle path, giving his reporter's attention to the facts, avoiding facile judgements, and presenting a story as striking and heartbreaking as the life if's drawn from.