Title: Pulp
Rating: 4 Stars
This was a book apparently designed for me. I enjoy hard boiled crime noir novels. I love absurdist humor. I like meta novels that poke fun at their own genre.
Nicky Belane is a hard boiled private dick. He spends nearly all of his time either in his office killing time or in a bar killing more time.
One day a beautiful femme fatale comes in. She calls herself Lady Death. She is on the hunt for a missing person, but not just any missing person. She hires Belane to look for Celine, the French author. Not a big deal but Celine has been dead for over thirty years.
Later Jack Bass visits Belane’s office. He has a much younger wife and he’s worried that she’s having an affair.
A man named Hal Groves also wants to hire Belane. He believes that a woman named Jeanne Nitro is an alien from another planet. Groves wants Belane to get her out of his life.
Finally, a man named John Barton wants him to find the Red Sparrow.
Belane takes all of the cases. With his going rate of $6 an hour (this is set in the 1990s), he is really going to bring in the cash!
It’s an absurdist tale. Belane can scarcely be bothered to leave his office. When he does leave it, it’s usually only to stumble to the nearest bar, order a drink, and to abuse the bartender and the other patrons.
Despite his claims to being the greatest private dick in LA, the cases pretty much solve themselves with no intervention of his own.
He accidentally runs into the not dead Celine at a local bookstore. He catches and videotapes Bass’ wife having sex. Unfortunately it’s with Jack Bass. Jeanne Nitro is in fact an alien from another planet, but gets arbitrarily sent back to her home planet.
He has no brilliant insights. He does not beat the pavement and hunt for clues. His tough guy antics are pretty much exclusively directed at ancillary characters.
Behind all of this lies an undercurrent of death. Lady Death is truly a harbinger of death. When Belane finds Celine, she immediately has him killed in an automotive accident. When Belane is nearly killed by being choked, at the last minute she swoops in and saves Belane’s life by giving his attempted murderer a heart attack. Even so, she keeps telling Belane that his time is coming. Ultimately, the Red Sparrow is a metaphor for his death.
This becomes more poignant when you discover that Bukowski was himself dying as he was writing Pulp. It is his last novel. In his novels, he wrote so much of himself into them that he managed to incorporate even his own dying and death into his last one.
The fact that there is so much absurdity, humor, and death imagery in this last novel as he is facing his own pending demise shows himself to be an exceptional and perceptive artist.
Chinaski would have been so proud.
dorkenstein 