“Every writer, every artist who visited New Orleans fell in love with it … New Orleans was a song that went under the waves. Sometimes in my dreams I see a city beneath the sea.”
I was unfamiliar with James Lee Burke until I read that his novel "The Tin Roof Blowdown" was considered the definitive work of fiction surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Looking at his catalog of work, I quickly found out that he's a tremendously prolific author (with two of his pieces having been transformed to the big screen) who focuses on the "Big Easy" and centers most of his novels around Dave Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic and police executive in New Iberia, Louisiana.
In this one, Burke uses first-person narrative to show us the devastation of Katrina on New Orleans -- physically, psychologically and socially -- through Robicheaux's eyes. The beginning of the book offers a harrowing, emotionally charged, gut-wrenching and exhausting account of life in the region in the hours after Hurricane Katrina. Burke's prose is stripped to the bone, offering a brutally honest assessment of all the violence, chaos, upheaval, ignorance and governmental aversion to all things New Orleans. Somewhat unavoidably, his writing is tinged with the pain and frustration that natives feel toward the government in Katrina's aftermath; he's able to use Robicheaux's voice to express his outrage and sadness at the plight of the Big Easy.
His writing is peppered with commentary about how New Orleans has changed and continues to change -- such as "Louisiana's wetlands continue to disappear at a rate of 47 square miles a year" -- and allows himself the departure of offering his very personal thoughts on those changes.
“New Orleans was systematically destroyed and that destruction began in the early 1980s with the deliberate reduction by half of the federal funding to the city and the simultaneous introduction of crack cocaine into the welfare projects. The failure to repair the levees before Katrina and the abandonment of tens of thousands of people to their fate in the aftermath have causes that I’ll let others sort out. But in my view the irrevocable fact remains that we saw an American city turned into Baghdad on the southern rim of the United States. If we have a precedent in our history for what happened in New Orleans, it’s lost on me.”
As to the story itself, it's an occasionally difficult-to-follow plot, with a lot of details to keep track of. At times, one wonders whether even Burke himself loses track of certain pieces of information. Not to give too much away, but there is a situation where a character named Bertrand stole some gas from Otis's garage, a detail that came up only later as an accepted fact, but one that neither Otis nor anyone else had discussed earlier. Some stuff isn't touched upon and is left unexplained, which perhaps contributes the rather sudden feel to the ending.
The story itself had a few too many holes and a few too many convenient coincidences for my liking (and, if we're being super-honest, a few too many stereotypes), and I'm not a fan of wrapping up loose ends rather sloppily, but it was an intriguing tale nonetheless. For me, "The Tin Roof Blowdown" was better for its brave subject matter and the insights it offered into the emotions of its author. At one point, you can hear Burke's voice through Robicheaux, as he waxes poetic about the Crescent City's distinctive and unique feel.
“Perhaps I carried too many memories of the way the city used to be … New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn’t belong to a state; it belonged to a people.”
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