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Book: Southland
Written by Nina Revoyr (Akashic Books)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz
Novels structured like Nina Revoyr's Southland possess tremendous capacity for intrigue. Utilizing a constantly regenerating narrative style, Revoyr weaves parallel story lines, tracing a woman's exploration of her deceased grandfather's life from his years as a decorated World War II vet to a prominent business owner in Los Angeles. His ascension to pillar of the community is turned over by a brutal murder in his store and she is armed with little more in the way of clues than a pocketful of pictures and a mysterious $38,000 inheritance. Reluctantly, Jackie Ishida unbinds herself from law school and her stale relationship to seek answers to questions posed by his case:
Three young African American men were found dead in his store during the Watt's riots of 1965, but at whose hands? Aided by one of the victims' cousins, James Lanier, almost thirty years later, she opens a Pandora's Box of racial misunderstanding and revisited local history that never stops twisting until the novel's last page.
Stylistically, Revoyr's deliberate prose allows readers an uncomfortable appreciation of the slow scorches racism burns on the face of a community. Both Japanese and African-American characters in Southland wear the scars of prejudice, from relocation in internment camps to LA riot racial profiling. Her bigoted white cop character Nick Lawson doesn't come out and speak his hatred in a quick convenient slur; rather, she allows his expressions and prickly disposition to build through small, antagonistic gestures. When finally he fires off his epithets, revealing to helpless witnesses his real feelings, the sickening distaste any reader may harbor is well earned.
Racism isn't necessarily the quick match and flame moment when neighborhoods erupt into riot in Southland; for Revoyr, it emerges gradually, on a slowly accumulating bed of fuel.
The success of this deliberate style comes with a caveat. In large spaces, the unhurried revelations hamper the novel's overall pace. It is hard to view the characters in the 1994 chapters - Jackie and her girlfriend Laura specifically - with anything but painful apathy. These are women passive about everything except gaining their public prestige. They seem content with sleepwalking through bored love lives, never interested enough to garner the necessary affection to act.
The chapters in Southland alternate, one taking place in the present with the next somewhere connected in the past. It is a clever means of constantly refreshing the narrative, but by the novel's end the present story is much less interesting - slower, and ultimately unable to fulfill its own weighty promise. The reader should be relieved, even ecstatic, when Jackie Ishida finally makes peace with her past and present, but it comes via too many dragging beats.
Too many at least, to capture any sense of urgency.
© 2003 - Erick Mertz