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YOU BELONG TO ME
By Colin Harrison
324 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
By Colin Harrison
324 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
Late into Colin Harrison’s noirish new novel, “You Belong to Me,” Paul Reeves, a prosperous 50-year-old immigration lawyer, sits in the storied Grand Central Oyster Bar, missing his father. “This doesn’t look like a church,” he recalls his father telling him when Paul was a boy. “But it is.” Decades later he surveys the familiar dark wood, the “ancient” waiters, the swordfish he and his father had seen still mounted over the bar. “You had to have places in the city like that,” he decides, “or you didn’t know who you were anymore.”
Is Paul longing for a simpler, more communal era when, as his father says, people could go to a bar and “feel like they are part of things”? Or is this the bleary nostalgia of certain white-men-of-comfort in a city always in flux? Both, it seems. Longing for a lost authenticity mingles with a deeper, less articulated fear of displacement and obsolescence. We hear echoes here of another noir hero, Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe, who is forever mourning a bygone Los Angeles — once “a big dry sunny place … good-hearted and peaceful,” as Chandler put it, but now given over to harsh neon, “fast-dollar boys” and a smug suburbia. Marlowe belongs nowhere.
Noir has always had a complicated relationship with nostalgia, alternately rejecting the past as a psychological prison and romanticizing it as the lost Eden that predated our fallen present. At its heart, however, the hard, hungry gaze of noir has always been fixed instead on the future. It’s a genre filled with the kind of characters the novelist Laura Lippman calls “dreamers who become schemers.” The dedicated employee who decides to steal from the boss, the drifter who wants the rich man’s wife, the low-rent crooks who try to pull off the big con.
Harrison loves his schemers, especially the high-stakes New York City variety, and his exuberance for plundering financiers, money-grubbing heirs and double-dealing musclemen for hire is the fuel that propels “You Belong to Me.” At the center is Paul, whose comfortable lifestyle comes from his boutique law practice but whose passion lies in obsessive rare map collecting. In the novel’s opening scene, Paul attends a map auction with his neighbor Jennifer, the fetching young wife of Ahmed Mehraz, a fast-rising lawyer-financier from a wealthy West Coast Iranian-American family. Mid-auction marks the sudden, dramatic appearance of William Wilkerson, a recently discharged Army Ranger and former lover from Jennifer’s hardscrabble past.
It’s a classic noir triangle, but it widens quickly to introduce a roundelay of characters with volatile tempers and conflicting agendas, including Paul’s sometime girlfriend Rachel, Ahmed’s worldly uncle Hassan, Wilkerson’s God-fearing Texan father, sundry contract killers and map dealers — even a former Mexican cartel assassin hiding from El Chapo. The common denominator among them seems to be a voracious hunger: for money, power, revenge, a baby, a bargaining chip, a return to a more glorious past — or, in Paul’s case, for a very old map. “Wish and dream,” Paul philosophizes at one point, standing among his maps. “Trouble and desire.”
The story that follows is deliciously twisty and, intermittently, startlingly violent. With such a wide cast, its many characters risk feeling like types, or even stereotypes, but Harrison attempts to give most of them a moment in the sun: an explanatory back story, a convincing moral justification, even a Rosebud moment. “Everyone had a private journey,” Paul observes, “and no one was ever completely known by anyone.” Some journeys, however, are more compelling than others; “You Belong to Me” is weakest when ventriloquizing its primary female characters, with Rachel and Jennifer never fully coming to life — and seldom driving any of the real action.
But Harrison’s interests are never entirely with the novel’s younger characters anyway. Instead, the emotional and moral heft of the story resides with its older men: Uncle Hassan, whose role in Iran’s tumultuous history has imbued him with a moral gravitas; Mr. Wilkerson, the Army Ranger’s father, who fairly glows with “Friday Night Lights”-style grace; and, ultimately, Paul himself. “No one,” Hassan ruminates at one point in the action, “is interested in the opinions of an old man … sitting next to a pool in California.” He adds, “History moved on, left you at the station holding a heavy suitcase and a worthless ticket.”
But within the moral universe of “You Belong to Me,” these three men of middle age — a father, a father figure and (if Paul’s girlfriend has her way) a father-to-be — exert a powerful force. “When you never know your father,” Jennifer speculates as her life unravels, “it causes all kinds of trouble.” It’s a view Paul, and Harrison’s narrative, support. The novel’s older men, these canny patriarchs, seem to understand everything the younger characters do not. If the hot passions of youth — desire, jealousy, foolish pride — fail to cool into something softer, more measured, then the catastrophe looms. It is up to these wise men to set things right, and Paul in particular succeeds in engineering, in the novel’s last pages, a dizzying series of machinations to institute an order on the disorder he sees, moving characters around likes pawns on a chess board. Or like push pins on a map.
Maps, as Paul tells us, seek to fix in place what can never be fixed. They attempt to stop time and assert a false permanence. And what rescues the ending of “You Belong to Me” from what might feel like too tidy a conclusion is the messiness that is Paul, the dreamer-schemer.
Early in the novel, Paul admits to dreaming of owning every map ever made of New York City. To do so, he feels, would give him a godlike power — a power even to destroy, if he so chooses. “For the collector collects to have. To own, to worship, to possess — to say this is mine and no one else’s.” This is the essence of noir, this unstoppable urge, this voracity so intense it starts to feel perverse even to the subject.
It is irresistible to note a very similar passage in Harrison’s recent account of his own obsessive map collecting in “Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York.” With exquisite unrepentance, he notes that his Brooklyn brownstone is covered in thousands of maps and he, like Paul, longs to own every one of New York City. “I crave them, I fever for them. I feel that a map I do not have but want is yet rightfully mine; I must touch them and smell them and possess them, must run my finger along their stiff or soft or irregular damaged edges.”
This is the obsession that we see in Paul and that thrums deliriously through the novel. He wants them all. He can’t stop, and doesn’t want to. It’s consuming. The hard, hot beat of noir goes on.
