Book Review
KING SUCKERMAN
By George P. Pelecanos
Dell
264 pages, $6.50 paperback
THE SWEET FOREVER
By George P. Pelecanos
Little, Brown
288 pages, $23.95 hardback
By Jamie Agnew
Community Relations Director at Aunt Agatha's.
The year 1976 was an interesting landmark in the American landscape. The bicentennial feil in the midst of a country still cruising on the fumes of the sixties, yet without the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon to counter, the counter culture became merely the culture, and without historical necessity a profound movement became trivial and the Youth International Party simply a party. George P. Pelecanos nails the movement perfectly in his new paperback, King Suckerman, the story of two friends, Marcus Clay and Dimitri Karras, in Washington, D.C. on July 4th, 1976.
Dimitri embodies the shallow hedonism of the age. Although he has a good heart, he's content to deal dope, pick up chicks, cruise in his Karmann Ghia, listen to tunes and play in pick-up basketball games. His black best friend Marcus has a more focused approach - a Vietnam veteran, he's opened a record store and is determined to rise from the streets. A lot of the book is about the clothes the characters wear and the music they listen to, but Pelecanos makes it all meaningful. The '70s commercialization of the '60s experimentation and technology produced some kicking, soulful tunes and the mass production of "non-conformist" garments brought some ridiculously audacious looks, particularly in the hands of a black culture experiencing an unprecedented self-confidence and strength.
But regardless of good vibes, good drugs and good threads, evil remains a constant in the world, and Dimitri and Marcus meet it face to face in the person of Wilton Cooper, a sociopathic ex-con. While scoring dope from a clueless godfather wannabe the friends come into conflict with Wilton and his criminal crew, momentarily besting them and, on impulse, snatching a bunch of their money. Wilton and his rabid-dog associates are already in the middle of a murderous rampage and, needless to say, this humiliation does not improve their disposition. Marcus is already up to the task of standing up to this threat, but he can 't succeed without Dimitri, who seems unable to rouse himself from his contented stupor, despite his creeping realization that maybe the party's over. There's a well-handled climax amidst the bicentennial fireworks, producing a few casualties, a few epiphanies and a satisfying ending to a great book.
Pelecanos' new hardback, The Sweet Forever, revisits Dimitri and Marcus ten years later in what has become a different world. 1986 was dead in the middle of the seemingly endless Reagan Bush years, peace and love replaced by militarism and greed, and gentle marijuana supplanted by corrupting cocaine. Marcus now has several record stores and Dimitri is working for him, but things aren't that great for them, with Marcus' family broken up by his workaholic drive and Dimitri's life foundering on the rocks of cocaine.
D.C. too is going downhill - Marcus' old neighborhood, the location of his new record store, is in the hands of the street soldiers, children dealing and dying, with the cops only interested in getting some of the drug money for themselves. The ghetto, the wellspring of black power and pride, has now become an infernal engine for the destruction of the young blacks who inhabit it. Above the narrative hangs the symbolic figure of Len Bias, the brilliant Maryland basketball star whose brilliant future is also snowed under by cocaine.
Like King Suckerman, the plot of The Sweet Forever revolves around stolen blood money, this time a pillowcase-full grabbed from a drug runner' s burning car by a friend of Dimitri. The local druglord is determined to get it back and to get payback on Marcus for trying to push the corruption off the streets. The action, like the decade, is grimmer and deeper, and Pelecanos builds on his previous book' s strengths to produce another great book that' s much more than a sequel, this one a reflection on a time when, as Marcus says, America was "so busy making money, ignorin' the ones who needed help, lookin' out for oursel ves, so busy lookin ' the other way." No matter what the characters are doing, hanging out or killing, Pelecanos' voice rings true. His prose has apeculiar, individual texture, an immediacy of time and place, and the slamming dexterity that mark him as one of the best young writers of today. ■