Life Sentences

I like Laura Lippman's work so much that I bought her latest and very recent book Life Sentences in hard cover. Though I have read, in a manner of speaking, many of her books, this is the only one I own. In fact, it's the only one I've ever held in my hands, whose spine I've cracked open.

I have been in the habit, over the last several years, of listening to novels. The 8- to 9-hour workday is prime recreational reading real estate. my work, being the work of words, allowed me to collapse my professional and personal lives. not always effectively, perhaps, but in any case, the practice allowed me the great treasure of Tess Monaghan and Laura Lippman's Baltimore, which is simultaneously Baltimore as I see and love it, and as I wish I really understood it, experientially. After first coming here 10 years ago and realizing that no place else had ever felt like home like this feels like home, I see that I still intuit this town more than anything else.

Lippman's narratives bear out my intuition--her love for this city, cloaked in fiction and literary personae, is apparent. And I find that as irresistable as her generous prose. Her craft is evident in the effortless way the text spirits me along. The lynchpins and hinges are so effective that you take them for granted without having to be preoccupied with any obvious, self-conscious hand-tipping about them mucking up a perfectly good story.

Life Sentences takes on the much-discussed issue of memoir--and the lines it crosses intentionally and unintentionally, the fallibility of memory. That resonates in her protagonist's name. Cassandra Fallows--a would-be prophetess mining her own life for truth.

The novel is remarkable, in my estimation, for taking on another issue that's seething beneath the surface again--the ongoing tension between white and black women's narratives--and how they often undermine each other, intentionally and unintentionally. It's one of her stand alone narratives, as the unparalleled What the Dead Know is. That book haunted me for weeks. I do not know of its contemporary equivalent when it comes to characterization or air-tight plot construction.

Now I'm waiting for the treatise on the often-misunderstood Gloria Bustamante. Life Sentences sets her up nicely for her own full-length feature. How about it, Laura?