Exploring shared trauma through the matrix of storytelling ranks among the noblest imperatives of narrative art. So perhaps the novelist or filmmaker will eventually emerge that’s capable of convincing me that the story of our shared misery could be something other than miserable.
However, I suspect that the artist in question will need considerable distance from these early, ugly days. In other words, by the time this person comes along, I’ll be long dead, and so will you, and Upsilon variant 7.31 will be tearing through the Arctic fishing village of New Detroit.
There was no way my father, 92 and with stage 4 metastatic colon cancer, could wait in the 40-minute line for what we knew would be his last meal at Katz’s Deli, so we dropped my sister off and went to park. Miraculously, after a single circling, we found a parking spot a block from the famous deli’s door.
Allow me to begin with the title. Amoralman is written as one word, so a mere addition of either one space or two produces polar opposites: Amoral Man. A Moral Man. Derek DelGaudio spends much of his highly readable book showing us an essentially decent man grown dangerously dependent on the safety net of secrecy and the lure of bending reality. It is no coincidence that his book’s title toys with the alphabet as if it were a guilefully shuffled deck of playing cards. And those spaces he plays with? They are the invisible parts of the title, as unseen as the secretive mechanics of any successful magic trick.
But it would be a mistake to read the title as referring to Lacenaire the Sinner, and Dostoevsky the Saint. Rather, each of us has the capacity for goodness and for cruelty. It is this fundamental insight by which Dostoevsky elevates the story of Lacenaire the unrepentant murderer into Raskolnikov the divided heart, who “might murder not because he was so evil but because he … wants to do good”, and whose actions turn out to be a mystery even to himself. Published 200 years after Dostoevsky was born, The Sinner and the Saint is not just a fitting tribute to one of the great works of world literature, but a dazzling literary detective story in its own right.
“You either slingin’ crack rock, or you got a wicked jump shot,” the Notorious B.I.G. lamented on his 1994 rap album “Ready to Die.” The line depressingly argued that prospects for young Black men in urban America were so circumscribed that the only way out was the illicit drug trade or growing at least six feet tall and becoming one of the lucky and talented few to play professional basketball.
“I’m Possible: A Story of Survival, a Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream” tells the story of how Richard Antoine White found another way: classical music.