One of my favorite reviews of Bones in the Wash is from my brother Michael, an English professor at the University of Detroit-Mercy. He may not be objective, but he does study and teach novels for a living. So that’s something.
(There are 67 other reviews if you want some less familial takes.)
Well-crafted, Thoughtful, and Fun
I know the guy who wrote this too, and have known him for a while. He is my brother. I was reading the book while traveling this summer, so I’ll start with one story of reading while on the train and one of reading while on the bus. I got more and more embroiled in the plot as I got further into the book, so I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings. And when I was within four paragraphs of finishing, my stop on the Chicago el train was coming right up. The train stopped and I had three paragraphs to go. Things in the book were pretty well wrapped up, but I wanted to see just how it ended. By the time the doors opened, I had one paragraph to go. I kept reading, finished, and dashed out the doors just as they were closing.
The day before, I was next to a guy on the bus, and I was talking about the book. I teach literature, so it’s a pleasure for me to talk about books. He was a reader, so he told me about Philip Roth and I told him about John Byrne Barry. Anyway, he said “Well, it must be awkward, you being an English professor and him wanting to know what you think of the book.” And I laughed and said it wasn’t awkward at all; the book was so good I didn’t need to worry about that for a second.
I like the book’s stories of trying to do the right thing in the context of hard-ball politics. It reminded me of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men that way — there are times when one of the main characters, an earnest young woman who wants to bring about political change, wonders whether it would be a morally just course of action, in the long run, to dig up dirt on her opponent’s campaign manager (who is another of the main characters), to discredit him and win the election for the candidate whom she genuinely believes occupies the moral high ground. There is a meditation on how we can know enough about the consequences of an act to judge whether it’s good or bad (good news? bad news? who knows?), there are references to the temptations of political office, temptations to take care of your people.
Mayor Tomas Zamara has lost his wife, years earlier, in a mysterious disappearance that is assumed to be a murder, and when we see one Mexican drug cartel try to frame another other cartel for the crime, there’s a parallel to another plot playing out that fall, in which one party is trying to frame the other for voter fraud. This book is plot-driven and it is, for that reason, a page-turner, but the author–I’ll call him John–puts a lot of care into the composition of that plot, and the way the small plots start to take on the same shape as the larger plot is one of the ways that shows. The book keeps a lot of plots going at once, and they’re all interesting. At some point a journalist named Bas is saying that this news story he’s covering has everything — family drama, game-changing moments, gangsterism, and illustrious history — and yes, this book has all that.
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