Chronicler of American venality

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE, who died in December, was the most modern of American novelists -- that is, he was as much a reporter as a fabulist. This gave his fiction the weight and gravity of truth. His great subjects were American institutions and enterprises: the courts, prisons, the media, the Catholic Church and Hollywood. “Nothing Lost,” his final novel, is a sprawling story of murder, corruption and mistakes.

Dunne was part of a disparate group of New York journalist-novelists including Tom Wolfe, Peter Maas, Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin. They’re tense and knowing and fascinated by the many ways the laws of God and man can be broken. Their novels feature intensely real depictions of the daily life of cities. They all (and certainly Dunne) differ from an earlier generation of novelists who dealt with crime and violence, in that they may be thought of as hard-boiled intellectuals or perhaps intellectuals manque. Dunne’s narrators occasionally comment on the meaning and the metaphors in his stories. You won’t find a lot of that in, say, Jim Thompson or David Goodis.

There’s been a ghastly murder in the state of South Midland, which is a version of Nebraska. One Edgar Parlance, a local African American who drifts about doing odd jobs and seems not to have had an enemy in the world, has been murdered in a gruesome way. Soon enough it’s clear who did it; the whys of it, though, are baffling. The murder sets off local paroxysms that will eventually metastasize and bring the scrutiny of a wider world to South Midland, a place rife with secret relationships and self-righteousness and seemingly interested only in college football, adultery and the covering up of crime.

The narrator of “Nothing Lost” is Max Cline, a former prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, now a private attorney who teaches part time at a local law school to help make ends meet. Max is gay, and his sexuality will be instrumental in unraveling the mystery of Parlance’s death. Max introduces us to the characters who will collide -- principally J.J. McClure (married to Poppy, a rich right-wing congresswoman), who once reported to Max in the A.G.’s homicide bureau and will prosecute the Parlance case, and Teresa Kean, who will eventually become defense counsel, with Max as her deputy. When we meet her, Teresa is a twice-divorced, do-good Washington lawyer running something called Justice for All. At a White House dinner, she meets Jack Broderick, the 60ish son of a billionaire. Readers of Dunne’s novels will recognize Jack, a onetime screenwriter, from earlier books, most recently “Playland” (1994), in which we also encounter Teresa’s natural parents, whom she never knew. Jack and Teresa wind up in bed, and Jack comes to a memorable end that would be a challenge to describe in this newspaper.

In the aftermath of Jack’s death and the scandal it causes, Teresa decamps for South Midland and an opportunity to defend the accused murderer of Edgar Parlance. Among the characters she deals with are Jocko Cannon, a college football star and local god who’s rich, vicious and too dumb to realize he’s moving the plot, and Allie Vasquez, J.J. McClure’s investigator, who knows how to work every side of every street she walks down. Allie is beautiful and sexy, and what’s more she manages to provide both her nominal boss J.J. and Max with the same information. (All parties recognize this; it’s a good example of how business is conducted in South Midland.) There are also secondary characters who, if tilted a few more degrees toward the comic, might have come from Elmore Leonard. Teresa’s client, one Duane Lajoie, the presumptive murderer, turns out to have a half-sister he’s never met, a wildly famous red-hot 17-year-old model called Carlyle, who descends on South Midland in a cloud of ego and excess, spreading chaos wherever she goes. It’s Carlyle who foots the considerable bill for Teresa’s defense of Lajoie. When the trial heats up and becomes a big enough story for Hollywood to notice, Dunne brings back Marty Magnin, a fabulously vulgar film producer, who has also figured in earlier novels.

It’s evident, even in this barest of outlines, that “Nothing Lost” uses the elements of traditional crime fiction: the apparently innocent victim who turns out to be something else entirely; the investigator who is taking care of herself as much as her employers; and, crucially, opposing counsel who find themselves thrown closely together. What lifts “Nothing Lost” above its gaudy subject matter and makes it greater than the sum of its parts are Dunne’s fascination with the conditions he finds in South Midland, from its trailer parks to its offices of law and government, and his grasp of the nature of power: how one person manages to get leverage over another and how that leverage is used (or, as one of Dunne’s characters might say, “is maximized”).

Infusing a commercial form with rich observation and conflicted characters was often Dunne’s fictional technique. In “True Confessions” (1977), he retold the story of Hollywood’s Black Dahlia murder as seen by two brothers, a priest and a cop, who represent the hierarchies of the church and the law; in “Dutch Shea, Jr.” (1982), he gives us the story of a disintegrating lawyer awash in a world of criminal behavior. It’s a canny narrative strategy that others have attempted. The shores are littered with the corpses of novelists who have tried to make literary fiction out of received plots. Some have succeeded -- John le Carre, with his Cold War spy novels, notably “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”; Larry McMurtry, in his western novels; and Richard Price, in his urban crime stories -- though no contemporary American novelist was better at it than Dunne. He digs into the characters and the place, in this case small-city America with its beliefs and customs. Political power is significant, though it is finally sexual passion and its unreliability that drive and define the characters and keep them in their class.

A novel can’t be first rate without a first-rate character at its core. In Teresa Kean (pronounced “Kane,” in the upper-middle-class Irish American manner), Dunne gives us a woman who is at once practical, capable and even idealistic but who has a self-destructive streak. “Playland” was about Teresa’s biological parents, the gangster Jacob King and his mistress, Blue Tyler, a onetime child movie star who barely made it into adulthood before disappearing for 40 years. Teresa’s adoptive parents were loving and raised her well, but it’s Jacob King and Blue Tyler who made Teresa’s destiny. Max says, “I think Teresa was the victim of her own blood.” Dunne never calls it the nature-or-nurture question, but his view is clear: Nurture is fine, but nature will prevail. It’s a view that animates this book.

The evidence for that view comes early in Duane Lajoie’s trial. Teresa and her opponent J.J. find themselves in a folie a deux that leads to and dramatizes another Dunne credo: “There is no end to grief. It’s there, a constant, layer upon layer over the years. Like barnacles on a sunken ship.” Teresa has enormous gifts but she comes to a harsh end, which seems preordained by the death of her natural father in “Playland.”

There’s a chilliness here, and occasionally the technical detail and some of Dunne’s signature techniques -- the insertion of scraps of official documents, newspaper and magazine articles, bits of screenplays and transcripts -- get in the way of character. But when Dunne hits his stride and the misdeeds are piling up, this book is gripping and cuts deep. In time, I think -- with “Playland” and its predecessor, “The Red White and Blue” (1987), in which Jack Broderick is introduced -- “Nothing Lost” will come to be seen as part three of Dunne’s American trilogy. America was his great subject, and he pursued it, depicting it, trying to contain it, allowing himself to be dazzled (though never surprised) by its malicious heart. He reveled in chicanery and human folly; it gave him his voice. John Gregory Dunne was our great connoisseur of venality. *