<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 1952 on Galveston Beach and seventeen-year-old Aaron Holland Broussard hits a drive-in for a burger after a day in the salt. Feeling lucky after swimming through a school of jellyfish without being stung, Aaron intervenes in an argument between the beautiful, brilliant Valerie Epstein and her mob-connected boyfriend Grady Harrelson (who \u201calways struck a pose that seemed to capture our times\u2014petulant, self-indulgent, glamourous in a casual way, and dangerous, with no self-knowledge\u201d).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Before it\u2019s all over, this innocent intervention exposes a vast right-wing conspiracy of garden-variety hoodlums, the Galveston branch of Murder, Incorporated, stone-cold hitters straight from Sicily, corrupt cops, former spooks, and Ayn Rand\u2013reading would-be brownshirts of River Oaks.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Aaron\u2019s mother is bipolar, reminding him of \u201ca crystal glass teetering on the edge of the drain board,\u201d and his father is an alcoholic who belongs to \u201cthat generation of Southerners drawn to self-destruction and impoverishment as though neurosis and penury represented virtue.\u201d Consequently, when the bad guys come for him, Aaron must depend upon Valerie, and his best friend Saber Bledsoe, \u201cthe trickster from classical folklore.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n James Lee Burke<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s patented form of classical themes are all here: misuse of power and authority, how fear can corrupt decent people, violence, responsibility, religion, love, regret, (what should be) the sacred communion of sex, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, courage, forgiveness, and the possibility of redemption. The Jealous Kind<\/em><\/strong><\/a> is made of those \u201cinterlude[s] in time when the potential for good or bad could go either way.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The intricate plot advances steadily with plenty of foreshadowing and twists to keep the pages turning. Burke\u2019s characters are genuinely complex and allowed to develop realistically throughout the novel. Aaron\u2019s first-person narration (\u201ca young person on the edge of discovering the world and shaking away the scales of . . . youth\u201d) is written from the perspective of sixty years hence. This lends a certain dissonance when Aaron appears to be wiser than his years, but this is a small flaw and infrequent.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Burke, owner of two Edgar Awards and named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, possesses a unique voice with such deliberate word choice that it creates its own atmosphere. He writes sentences that make you want to go outside where \u201c[t]he sky was black, creaking with electricity, like someone crumpling cellophane\u201d amid \u201ctrees swelling in the wind\u201d to fill your lungs with the \u201codor of rain striking a hot sidewalk.\u201d Grady Harrelson\u2019s father has \u201can antiseptic cleanliness about him that made [Aaron] wonder if his glands were capable of secretion.\u201d We\u2019re on Burke\u2019s planet now.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Burke scrapes the nostalgic shellac from the Father Knows Best<\/em> version of the 1950s to expose the fault lines of socioeconomic class, despite an uncharacteristically sweet and sentimental final paragraph. Burke\u2019s protagonists don\u2019t go looking for trouble, but when trouble comes looking for them they have to shut it down, or it will keep returning and make of their lives rented things. The Jealous Kind<\/em> is a coming-of-age tale about how to be an honorable person in an often less-than-honorable world.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A review of James Lee Burke’s new novel, The Jealous Kind<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":638,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,56,55,12,8,15,111],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fiction","tag-historicalfiction","tag-literaryfiction","tag-lonestarreview","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-texasauthor","tag-texasbook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}