Scars and Shadows

“The Turnaround does not break new ground,” writes January Magazine critic Jim Winter of George Pelecanos’ latest novel. “Instead, author Pelecanos plays all the familiar notes to bring out what’s on his mind.” If that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, then you’d better read further in Winter’s review, because he finds great pleasure in Pelecanos being Pelecanos once more.

Winter explains the set-up of The Turnaround thusly:

It’s 1972, and Alex Pappas doesn’t want any trouble. He just wants to go to college and become a writer. He’s not even interested in taking over his father’s coffee shop, much as his father wants him to do. Hoping to stay clear of trouble, as well, is James Monroe, who wants to become a mechanic like his own father. But when Alex and two friends make a beer-fueled run into Washington, D.C.’s Heathrow Heights, an isolated black neighborhood, their worlds are irrevocably ruined. A shouted racial epithet turns into a fight that leaves one boy dead, Alex maimed and James headed for prison.

Dead is Billy Cachoris, who drove the car into Heathrow Heights with Alex and another boy, Peter Whitten. One of those boys throws a cherry pie at someone and yells “Nigger!” That sets off Heathrow Heights kid Raymond Monroe, James’ younger brother, and sparks a fight between the boys in Cachoris’ car and the neighborhood boys. Egging on the Monroe brothers is a thug-in-training named Charles Barker. The fight, which costs Billy Cachoris his life, sends both Peter Whitten and an injured Alex Pappas running.

From there, the story jumps ahead. We see what has become of Alex Pappas and James and Raymond Monroe, how the violence of their urban childhood has come to haunt their adulthood, in large part through the malicious efforts of Charles Baker, a “a stupid animal” and career criminal who “believes that the slaying back in 1972 of Billy Cachoris, Alex’s friend, ruined his life.” As with any Pelecanos novel, The Turnaround is filled with music and a look at the broad range of black culture. And fine prose, always fine prose.

Read all of Jim Winter’s review here.

READ MORE: “George Pelecanos Q&A,” by Damien Seaman (Shots); “Murder He Wrote,” by Amy Raphael (London Observer); “George Pelecanos, The Turnaround,” by Michael Carlson (Irresistible Targets).