Two Trains Running
Vachss is a lawyer specializing in–and devoted to–the rights of children; his books take him and his readers to the dark, murky places he can’t go to in court. They look long and hard at the damage done by child abuse, detail how it’s done, and then slowly, thoroughly, decimate the evildoers. They are satisfying and scary, touching some deep part that still believes in things like bloody retribution.
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Vachss has said repeatedly that his “religion” is revenge: there’s not a lot of violence for its own sake in his books. His latest novel, Two Trains Running, is full of his signature infatuation with gadgetry, guns, cars, and women’s posteriors, but the violence, while as heartbreaking as ever, is muted and more diffuse. Two Trains Running is also a departure in that it’s historical–taking place during one two-week period in 1959–and is narrated in the third person, not the first as the titles in his popular Burke series (named for their private-eye antihero) are. Vachss’s credos that society “makes our monsters” through neglect of the child and that “child protection and crime prevention are inextricably intertwined” are still in evidence, but instances of child abuse are confined to individual backstories and the political powers at work are much larger than any single malefactor.
But where Red Harvest is the purest detective novel ever written, a breathless violent gallop that comes out blasting at the beginning and never stops, Two Trains Running, despite some early mayhem, builds and builds to its final blowup through dialogue, dialogue that’s always explaining, gradually revealing the field and the players’ motivations. Red Harvest is a study in sheer animal instinct; Two Trains Running is a book about politics, power, and corruption. Looming over everything are issues like the coming election of John F. Kennedy, the murder of Emmett Till, and postwar disillusionment with government. One whole section is devoted to the theory that the FBI gave Capone syphilis. It’s sort of the anti-Red Harvest, explaining life in contemporary America via a world-weary snapshot of the past. Vachss does the same thing in his other novels, but more persuasively–the Burke books feel lurid but have proven to be fairly prescient about the forms malfeasance will take in the future: human organ trafficking, Internet child porn, Columbine-style massacres.
Andrew Vachss
Where: Barbara’s Bookstore, 1218 S. Halsted
