The New York Times's obituary for Joan Acocella, who died Sunday, highlights her work as a dance critic, but she also reviewed books and authors and wrote literary essays. To her, a ballet aficionado, I owe my first acquaintance with the fiction of Elmore Leonard, whose specialty was criminals and assorted other lowlifes. When Leonard died, in 2013, she wrote an appreciative obit/review for The New Yorker. I'm pretty sure it's behind a pay wall, but, on the occasion of her death, The New York Review of Books is granting free online access to several of her essays originally published in that journal, including one on Leonard, from 2015, when the Library of America first published a couple collections of his novels. The whole piece is entertaining and full of her unpretentious intelligence; I'm going to set down below a passage that probably sheds some light on why, having read her on Leonard, I picked up a novel of his to read, and have by now read through his entire body of work, not that it was a chore (if I live ten more years, I'll probably do it again). The preface to the quotation would be that Leonard is widely regarded as a master of dialogue, and everyone who writes about him takes a crack at explaining his "ear"; Acocella has the good sense to let a few examples speak for themselves, including:
Leonard's dialogue contains great tributes to the speech of Mexican-Americans and Cuban-Americans and old Jewish men named Maury who want to tell you how much better things were in Miami in the old days. But Leonard lived almost all his life in and around Detroit, a city where, in his time, more than half of the people, and well over half of the people involved with the criminal justice system, were African-American. Consequently, a lot of his best characters are black, and speak a language that many people, black and white, would agree is classic African-American, mid-twentieth-century, northern. Early in his Unknown Man No. 89 (1977) we encounter a situation commonly found in stories about crimes committed by people working in tandem: not all the collaborators know what the take was, and some of them suspect that they're not being given their fair share. In Unknown Man one bank robber asks another how much they got from the Wyandotte Savings Job:
"We didn't get nothing," Bobby said.
Virgil nodded, very slowly. "That's what I was afraid you were going to say. Nothing from the cashier windows?"
"Nothing," Bobby said. "No time."
"I heard seventeen big ones."
"You heard shit."
"Told to me by honest gentlemen work for the prosecuting attorney."
"Told to you by your mama it still shit."
Virgil then excuses himself to go to the bathroom, emerges with a twelve-gauge shotgun, and blows Bobby away.
Thanks for the tip, Joan. I don't doubt that you were just as good on the subject of Mikhail Baryshnikov.