(1995-05-14) Amis Junk Souls

Martin Amis: Junk Souls. RIDING THE RAP By Elmore Leonard. Elmore Leonard is a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers. He belongs, then, not to the mainstream but to the genres.

Whereas genre fiction, on the whole, heavily relies on plot, mainstream fiction, famously, has only about a dozen plots to recombinate (boy meets girl, good beats bad and so on). But Mr. Leonard has only one plot. All his thrillers are Pardoner's Tales, in which Death roams the land -- usually Miami and Detroit -- disguised as money.

Nevertheless, Mr. Leonard possesses gifts -- of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing -- that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.

The essence of Elmore is to be found in his use of the present participle.

What this means, in effect, is that he has discovered a way of slowing down and suspending the English sentence -- or let's say the American sentence, because Mr. Leonard is as American as jazz. Instead of writing "Warren Ganz III lived up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County," Mr. Leonard writes, "Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County." He writes, "Bobby saying,"

We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr. Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players' hidden minds.

He can do melody, but he is also as harshly sophisticated as late Coleman Hawkins. He understands the post-modern world -- the world of wised-up rabble and zero authenticity.

His characters are equipped not with obligingly suggestive childhoods or case histories, but with a cranial jukebox of situation comedies and talk shows and advertising jingles, their dreams and dreads all mediated and secondhand. They are not lost souls or dead souls. Terrible and pitiable (and often downright endearing), they are simply junk souls: quarter-pounders, with cheese. (junk food)

Ranged against these seedy blunderers is United States Marshal Raylan Givens (a welcome carry-over, like Harry Arno, from Mr. Leonard's previous novel, "Pronto").

Of course the scheme unravels into a peculiarly American chaos. Crime, Mr. Leonard insistently informs us, is always half-baked, and always goes off half-cocked. Death (or life, behind bars) comes in the form of the fast buck, or its promise

Raylan isn't post-modern, he is an anachronism from out of town. And he is fascinating, because he shows you what Mr. Leonard actually holds dear.