If one were to play a word association game, the term "Louisiana" to most people would elicit the response of "Mardi Gras" or "New Orleans." There is far more to the state, however, than the area bordered by Jefferson Parish, the Mississippi, and Lake Pontchartrain. Head west on I-10 out of the Vieux Carre, through the Warehouse District and Uptown, and after about an hour's drive and a short trip through downtown Baton Rouge, the real Louisiana comes into view. You'll see mountains of refined bauxite, thick swamps, and roadside butcher shops selling boudin and head cheese and quarter cracklins and iced bottled sodas to barefoot black children who walked from God-knows-where. Keep driving, deeper into the gulf coast, away from the drunken revelry of the French Quarter and the airboats full of sweaty tourists piloted by grinning, unshaven men in floppy hats who in accent Cajune relate stories of encounters with alligators while cautioning their charges not to dip their hands into the water. You'll pass through small towns that seem to rise, like Brigadoon, out of the mist from some other era, with populations of only a few thousand whose residents wonder at you with a curious meeting of the eye. It is from this southern Louisiana, caught, perhaps irrevocably, in the dual pinchers of the past and the present, that James Lee Burke is hewing a series of novels that taken together stand as a documentation of southern culture eclipsed only, perhaps, by the work of William Faulkner.
Burke's vehicle is a New Iberia police detective named Dave Robicheaux, a dangerously, perhaps fatally, flawed man whose struggle against the evils of the world around him are eclipsed only by his battle with his own dark side, a battle that, more often than not, ends in a draw. JOLIE BLON'S BOUNCE, Burke's latest account of Robicheaux's exploits, is full of the elements that have made the previous novels such consistent favorites with those who have discovered them: explosive violence, introspective wisdom, and a poetic prose that at times is almost painful to behold in its radiance and brilliance. But JOLIE BLON'S BOUNCE is, in one way, perhaps the penultimate Burke novel, the closest that Burke has yet come to crafting a fully allegorical tale.
JOLIE BLON'S BOUNCE begins with a brief but important foray into Robicheaux's past before bringing the reader abruptly into the present, a present consisting of the senseless, brutal murder of a popular teenager. The immediate suspect, Tee Bobby Hulin, is a drug-addicted musician regarded around southern Louisiana as the second coming of Guitar Slim. Robicheaux has doubts about Hulin's involvement in the murder. However, another killing soon follows, and Hulin again appears to be the likely culprit. The second victim is the antithesis of the first; she is a drug addicted prostitute who happens to be the daughter of a local Mafioso, a man more than prepared to mete out his own rough vengeance, if not justice, upon the murderer of his daughter. Standing like a shadow in the background is the malevolent Legion Guidry, an individual of mystery and such casual cruelty that he has acquired a terrifying reputation existing for decades among the black residents of the area. Robicheaux's sudden, brutal encounter with Guidry results in Robicheaux's problems with substance addiction and the attendant baggage coming to the fore and putting everything he holds dear at risk, from his relation with his family to the lives of his friends.
As Robicheaux struggles to overcome his addiction and regain his manhood, he finds redemption in two unlikely sources: his old friend, Clete Purcel, and a homeless drifter who claims to have been Robicheaux's rescuer in a firefight during the Vietnam war. Meanwhile, in the South Louisiana countryside, lies a quiet, hidden reign of terror perpetrated by individuals working in unconscious tandem and deliberate cross purposes. The apocalyptic conclusion to JOLIE BLON'S BOUNCE is at once inevitable, and surprising, and may well contain the seed of another, more definitive conclusion.
There is, quite simply, no one presently writing who has the perception and descriptive power of James Lee Burke. He is in the process of composing a body of work that, when complete, may well stand unequaled. And of these works, JOLIE BLON'S BOUNCE may well be the summit.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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