The Lost Get-Back Boogie [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Booze is the prime demon for Iry Paret, dark and heavy hero of the demon-ridden novel, The Lost Get-Back Boogie. When Iry is paroled and three miles away from Angola prison, the foam is boiling over the lip of his first icy Jax; from then on, empty cans and bottle rattle in the cyclonic contests with the lesser demons; the sheriff, environment-stinking pulp mills, Vietnam memories, nightmares of drunken rage and helplessness.

Buddy, Iry's friend from Angola, calls him Zeno. Zeno was the Greek founder of Stoicism, the school of impassivity, indifference to pleasure or pain. Buddy, the mean-drunk tilter at alcohol-induced windmills, enlists his friend the stoic in his battle against his own - and his family's - demons. Even the trucks and cars in their life are beset by the devils of redneck vengeance and drunken driving on mountain roads.

It is painful to accompany Iry and Buddy as they drink, and weather jail, brawls, vicious beatings, cruel attacks on Buddy's father's beloved horses and wild birds. Burke's descriptive powers evoke sympathetic response as our eyes blear and our limbs numb and our nostrils fill with the stink of pervasive whiskey and beer, and we wish to God no one ever hurt like this.

With the same power of words, Burke sets us first in Louisiana and then in Montana. We see the Mississippi River and prisoners clearing cane fields of tree roots; we feel the sun and smell the damp from the bayou. Montana is given to us gloriously; river, mountain, sky, clean crisp air, the dust of unpaved roads, taste of trout just taken from icy streams, snow crystals in a woman's hair. Burke is an extraordinary visual writer - what he shows you, you see. The juxtaposition of this enormous grandeur with the sad and violent men who are imprisoned in murky impulses and urges is somehow not jarring.

Iry's wanderings through various "dirty little corners of the universe" can barely be called a quest. He avoids reflection; else he may have to admit other's evaluation; that "I had a little screw in the back of my head turned a few degrees off center." Alcohol can do that to you, but Iry doesn't realize it. Burke's well-known character Dave Robicheaux is what Iry could become if he stumbled into sobriety. Robicheaux still has his lesser demons, but he's been given a daily reprieve from the clutches of the big one.

We like Iry and Buddy; even their enemies are not without our sympathy. The images Burke draw remain long after the book is closed and are a compelling reason to brave the discomfort of reading through to the end. Burke is in the forefront of the genre of recovering alcoholic detective. The Lost Get-Back Boogie, certainly outside the genre and not a mystery novel at all, will intrigue fans of Dave Robicheaux and perhaps adds depth to our understanding of him.

Having found The Lost Get-Back Boogie in paperback recently, I rushed home and settled down, expecting a good Dave Robicheaux read. Only then did I see that this novel was pre-Robicheaux. My disappointment, however, didn't last beyond the first sentence. That's how long it took Burke to assure me that already, in this early novel, he was master of the wonderful atmospheric style that I love, a style that is as close to poetry as prose can get. Can anyone else make poetry out of a description of a Louisiana chain gang? ("The captain was silhouetted on horseback like a piece of burt iron against the sun.") And, can anyone else draw his readers so instantly into empathy with his flawed hero -- whatever name he chooses for that particular hero?

In Iry Paret we have Burke's hallmark character: The strong, silent type, tough as nails and sharp as razor blades, who is yet a thinking, sensitive, deeply caring man; a young Louisiana blues singer, veteran of the Korean war, who wants nothing more than to be left in peace to play his guitar, sing his blues -- and finish the song he has been trying to write for years! Though he came home from the war unable to hunt and kill animals, he has done time in Angola for killing a man in a barroom brawl. It seemed to have been a case of self-defense but Iry, with the sense of guilt he wears like a mantle around his shoulders, is convinced he deserved the sentence.

As Beth Riordan, the woman he comes to love, says to him, "You are a strange mixture of men." Yes. But a totally believable mixture. And totally sympathetic. So when, before the first chapter ends, Iry with his new parole walks away from Angola, we find we are walking with him, in his shoes, inside his skin. By giving us a close-up look at the prison, showing us where Iry's coming from, Burke evokes in us a greater desire to see him stay out of trouble. As he walks up that dusty road, refusing a ride in the prison truck because he "has to air it out," we know tha! t just one misstep -- and Iry will make plenty of them -- could hurl him right back where he came from. And we are afraid from him.

Iry reaches his bayou home to find his father dying of cancer, both his brother and sister more foe than friend, and all his old friends dispersed and lost to him, no longer making music. When his father dies two weeks later, he gets his parole transferred to Montanna where he joins his one last friend Buddy Riordan, whom he befriended in prison.

Montanna looks like paradise to Iry, but there's trouble brewing. Rancher Frank Riordan, Buddy's father who sponsored Iry's parole transfer, is fighting the new factories that are polluting Montana. And the workers in those factories are fighting back. Though he tries to claim neutrality, Iry is pulled inexorably into that trouble until he is fighting not only for his freedom but for his very life.

This heart-wrenching, heart-warming novel is ultimately a love story. For in the end it is love that must overcome all, if all is to be overcome. Iry falls in love with Beth, Buddy's ex-wife, another guilt-evoking situation because Buddy is still trying to win her back. Can Iry have this love without betraying his friend? And will that love give him strength to transcend his own flawed nature? When everything shatters around him, will love enable him to withstand all the forces that are striving to bring him down? And finally to finish writing his song, "The Lost Get-Back Boogie"?

"The Lost Get-Back Boogie," (1986), was the fifth novel published by American author James Lee Burke, writer of The New York Times bestselling Dave Robicheaux series. It preceded The Neon Rain, first published novel in the Robicheaux series of southern noir mysteries/police procedurals. "The Lost Get-Back Boogie," a crime drama, was, according to the author's website, rejected 111 times over a period of nine years; upon finally being published by the Louisiana State University press, it was nominated for a hugely prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

The protagonist of "Lost Get-Back," is Iry Paret, who, like the detective Robicheaux, is of Cajun ancestry, and is still reliving the nightmare of his wartime service-- in Paret's case, in Korea. He too has a drinking problem, difficulty with authority figures, and a tendency to violence. There's no question but that he echoes J.P. Winfield, a country music guitarist, and Avery Broussard, an oil rig roustabout, both of whom have a weakness for drink, protagonists from Burke's earliest published work,Half of Paradise. There's even less question that he is more or less an early version of Robicheaux. Paret's arc within this book even encapsulates the Robicheaux series, which was initially set in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the American Gulf Coast; then moves to the mountainous state of Montana. In this novel, the protagonist's tale begins in Louisiana, Gulf Coast country; he then moves to Montana. Paret situates himself, in Montana, in the Bitterroot River valley, near the Swan Valley. (Both Bitterroot and Swan Peak will turn up as titles in the later Robicheaux series.)

We meet the young cajun Paret, a country music guitarist, as he is being released from Angola, the notorious Louisiana state prison. And, more than anything else, it sometimes seems to me, in Burke's work, we'll enjoy some of the most beautiful, knowledgeable writing ever committed to paper about the flora, fauna, geography, and human occupants of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, now so much in the news. This area is more or less Burke's home turf: he was born in Houston, Texas in 1936, grew up on the Texas-Louisiana gulf coast, attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute; later received B. A. and M. A. degrees from the University of Missouri in 1958 and 1960 respectively.

However, a jailhouse friend of Iry's, the jazz musician Buddy Riordan, calls him to Montana, and there he goes. And I'd be the first to admit that Burke describes the flora, fauna, geography, and human occupants of Montana beautifully: his descriptions just lack the passion and power of his Gulf Coast work. At any rate, Buddy's father is the first of the old guy environmental nuts, pursuing their agendas without taking into account the jobs of their neighbors, whom we will meet in Burke's Montana work. Needless to say, it makes the Riordans locally unpopular, and from that bad things start to happen.

I found the lengthy descriptions of drinking and drugging a bit tedious after a while. The dated jazz hipster slang was even more so: endless descriptions of a person as a "cat," too much of "daddio;" and why oh why did Iry and Buddy call each other "Zeno?" Nevertheless, Burke gives us virile and vivid prose in this book, and unleashes a powerful sucker punch of an ending that I didn't see coming.

Over the years Burke worked as a landman for Sinclair Oil Company, a pipeliner, land surveyor, newspaper reporter, college English professor, social worker on Skid Row in Los Angeles, clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, and instructor in the U. S. Job Corps. His work has twice been awarded an Edgar for Best Crime Novel of the Year. At least eight of his Robicheaux novels, including the more recent Jolie Blon's Bounce,Cadillac Jukebox, and Purple Cane Road have been New York Times bestsellers. Truly, he's worth reading, tho "Lost Get-Back," Pulitzer nominee or not, may not be the place to start.