Jim Thomsen's Reviews > The Damned Lovely

"This was pure. And I was going to dig deep into the root of my obsession because it was mine alone. I mean, I needed something to believe in."

Sam is a loser. He's a writer who hasn't written much, at least for publication and pay, so he's mostly a rideshare driver, making just enough to cover his half pf the rent at an apartment he shares with a white-supremacist-in-training, and more importantly, his constantly running tabs at The Damned Lovely, a dive bar in Glendale, California, a dive city, where the regulars form a sort of "Cheers" type of family; that is, if "Cheers" had been written by Newton Thornburg or Richard Lange or Jordan Harper.

And when a pretty young woman comes into The Damned Lovely and is murdered barely a day later, something awakes in Sam, and, yes, this IS one of those novels in which a woman's death is the catalyst for a man's redemption, and while that's an icky construct in the abstract, it works in reality because THE DAMNED LOVELY is not really a mystery or a thriller, but a contemporary noir about a loser who 's inspired to find a hidden higher gear within himself. And Adam Frost makes us feel, in every passage and on every page, how much this broken man needs to be better — not just for justice for the late Josie Pendleton, but for himself, and for the world in which he does little more than take up barstool space so he can eventually live a life in which he's not brooding over dead women but trying to be alive for the living ones. He's a toxic white male who needs to purge the toxins — of the human type and societal type as well as the alcohol type — from his cerebral bloodstream. It would be nice if he his fellow regulars at The Damned Lovely were able to help, but if they can't, he'll blunder into the cathartic truth on his own, regardless of who has to get sideswiped and swept aside in the process. As he puts it: "And worst of all. I was compelled by a force inside my bones to write something real. Something long and from the heart. Something maybe even wise."

As such, THE DAMNED LOVELY is a plotted story that's not really about plot; the Dead Girl doesn't really register to much affect here, nor do the characters who pass through to beat, berate, ignore or help Sam along his slouch toward Bethlehem. It's about a man who's learning to get out of his own way, who's having to learn over and over that he's not as smart, or as dumb, as he thinks he is, and that if he could just find his place, he could do more with his life than moon over ladies well out of his league, and overcome the tiresome limitations of the Dead Girl tropes that toxify too many male-penned noir stories.

It helps that Sam doesn't think of himself as an alpha male, that he lacks much skill as a self-appointed avenger of wrongs, and that his successes come mostly from what his failures stir up. He's no Fletch, no Elvis Cole, no Harry Bosch, no hero. And yet he's not quite the sum of his failings, either. He's just a guy who's taking the long way around the barn, to borrow a saying of my dad's, toward figuring things out in life. As he reflects: "I am not a wise and intelligent detective. I am Sam. A failed writer trying to feel like a wise detective cuz I can’t write one truthfully."

As such, he's a refreshing presence in a world full of panty-dropping knight-errants and smug professionals who effortlessly bulldoze their way through everything in the shadows of greater L.A. Deep down, he wants to be exactly the opposite of an aspirational-male trope even as he is pretty much the sum of his aspiration: He's self-deprecating and semi-self-aware, and Adam Frost renders him with winning empathy:. As the bar's owner, a retired LA cop, tells him: “I love ya, kid. You know I do. But where’s this all getting you? Look at your face. You’ve been chewed up. Inside and out. Why don’t you give it a break? Go hide behind a computer and write something. Something to make yourself proud or smile or I don’t know. You’re obviously good at it. You’re just tripping yourself up with this Josie dirt. I get it, you’ve put a lot of yourself into it, but at the end of the day, where’s it really getting you?”

And because Sam is willing to honestly explore that question in all its depth and breadth, he rises above the Man Redeemed By a Dead Girl cliché. Because whatever he finds out through his messy investigating, it'll change him, for the better. Even if it turns out that dead is better, which it might well be. Sam comes close to finding out, through the shocking reveal of the true killer, and one way or the other, he knows there's no going back to the underachieving barfly that he was in the book's beginning. And that gives him an endearing sense of his own fallibility without ever lapsing fully into the clichés of male pathos, even as he emodies them on the surface. He knows that he not only needs to be better for himself, but for the world in general — and for the female world in particular.

I'll be honest: Novels like this are for me. I'm one of those readers who interprets "escapist reading" much differently than the literary ecosystem does: I read to escape INTO my reality, to understand why I'm such a loser, and to understand what can be done about it by riding shotgun with those in the same leaking boat, those created by those writers who know these people as well as I know myself. And when they engage their hidden higher gear in the pursuit of redemptive truth, it makes me want to do the same. And even as it awakens some potentially toxic-male truths as well ... well, isn't that a good thing? To be aware of the work ahead, and to drag out the pick and shovel, the way Sam does in THE DAMNED LOVELY, and get to work, and to stay at work?

Much of this journey is made palatable, and even pleasing, through Frost's wryly cynical-but-hopeful voice. There are dozens of great lines here, and I'll share a few:

"It’s not supposed to be for a wide audience. It’s supposed to be good."

“There’s no soul in a Starbucks, Slice. I can’t write someplace without soul.”

"How do you ask someone if they committed murder? I hadn’t a clue. But. I had spent well over a thousand hours boozing with ex-cops pulling stories and figured I’d wing it."

"I kept drinking. Did I really just defend Glendale?"

"I was no longer welcome at the Cheesecake Factory."

"I needed to get into Josie life. In a most digital way. I wanted emails, texts. I wanted private communiqué. I wanted her data all up close and personal in my face. I wanted to know what kinda music she listened to. Movies she watched. Songs she liked. The bad gym mix. Her Counting Crows ugly secret. Her favorite stupid emoji. All of it."

"“The article. I wanna turn it into a TV show. You’ve got all these burnouts—what a great cast. And the cop thing. It’s like Cheers meets Murder, She Wrote. But newer. Cooler. Every week the characters, the ex-cops, will solve a crime. With Slice blazing the trail. You know, the disgraced ex-cop with killer instincts that everyone underestimates. It could be a fun crime show. A dramedy. But with heart. Whaddya think?”

"I was pretty sure she didn’t want to sleep with me either, but then again, those three dots popped up so fast I couldn’t help but smell a whiff of want."

"I was pretty sure she didn’t want to sleep with me either, but then again, those three dots popped up so fast I couldn’t help but smell a whiff of want."

"Backyard Dreams had an office in North Hollywood off Lankershim. Deep in the valley of displaced dreams and runoff satisfaction. A cross-section of start-up families, second gen’ immigrants, and struggling actors. A land of faux happiness you could smell driving down the main strip. I mean, does anyone move to Los Angeles, California with dreams of living in North Hollywood?"

"This be Glendale. The land of Chevy Chase Boulevard. That hurricane of car dealerships and sparkling ribbons promising the American dream. Oh, and while you’re here—have you been up the street? It’s the Americana! The Grove without a soul. Without the gloss but all the function and cheaper parking. Just take San Fernando Road, that endless pipe to nowhere. Glendale. That bland ugly open secret, where nothing ever happens. Nothing wild. Nothing wonderful. Wedged between the trendy boulevards of Silverlake. The Los Feliz hills. The cute bungalows of Atwater Village. The historic Pasadena mansions. The Santa Anita horse track. The JPL. Roofs with a pulse. With history and feeling. Glendale. That tasteless grid of flat streets and relentless, punishing sunshine in search of a soul. The shrug of a last resort: I mean, I guess we could live in Glendale… Glendale. My home for nine years. I’d accepted this. Like some kinda dull splinter. Like one of these days this pain would figure itself out. Take a page from her neighbors and stop being such a sad sack single kid with cooler cousins named Echo Park and Silverlake and Mount Washington. If they can do it, why can’t we? Why can’t we, fellas? Because, cous’, you be Glendale… Glendale. That ugly chore we’re gonna fix up one of these days."

(One stra deducted for a) incredibly sloppy copy-editing; b) the lack of depth and resonance among most of the secondary characters; and c) some implausibly convenient plot twists. THE DAMNED LOVEL is still a very good novel, just not quite a great one. I would have loved to have been its editor so I could help lift it up to that fifth star.)