James Hynes

The fifth season of The Wire has started, and not a moment too soon. But in a couple of months fans of intelligent, layered, brilliantly plotted, morally complex, politically engaged, and world-encompassing narrative will be faced with a existential dilemma:  what do we watch now? From the looks of it, HBO doesn't seem to be planning anything similar—most of the new shows seem to be about unhappy middle-class folks whining to their therapists. Battlestar Galactica, which scratches most of the itches listed above, starts up soon on Sci Fi, but not everyone is willing to make the leap from the drug corners of Baltimore to the Twelve Colonies on the run.

So why not return to The Wire's original inspiration (sez the midlist novelist) and pick up a book? It's a commonplace by now that The Wire is more like a novel than an episodic TV show, and the show's fame has (I hope) introduced many of its viewers to the work of the novelists who write for the show, namely George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price. Price's novels especially were a big inspiration for David Simon and Ed Burns, in particular the drug war epic Clockers. And I noticed in the credits of last night's show that the crime novelist (and David Simon's wife) Laura Lippman had a cameo (I think she was the blond woman in the scene where some journalists at the Baltimore Sun are watching the smoke from a fire in East Baltimore). I haven't read any of her Baltimore-based mystery novels, but they have been very well-reviewed.

It would also be great if all the comparisons of The Wire with the novels of Dickens would lure a few viewers to some of his darker, more ambitious later novels, like Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. Laura Miller makes an interesting argument that The Wire isn't really like Dickens at all, and while it's true that The Wire is much bleaker and vastly less sentimental than Dickens, I still think the comparison holds, for two reasons. One is that both narratives cut a longitudinal slice through an entire city, from top to bottom, showing us the lives of a vast range of colorful characters. It's not too much of a stretch to see the drug lord Marlo Stansfield as a postmodern (one of David Simon's favorite words) version of Fagin, in that both characters recruit desperate boys to commit crimes. And minus the casual obscenities, you could lift Proposition Joe, name and all, out of The Wire and drop him straight into a Dickens novel. The other reason is that both Dickens and Simon and his writers are motivated by a righteous rage at a system that grinds up the poor. Dickens may goad and hector his readers in a way that Simon doesn't, but there's no mistaking the similar fury in both men.

Simon himself has invoked the playwrights of classical Greece as an influence; he's been quoted in The New Yorker as saying that “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.” It gives this middle-aged midlister (and occasional college professor) a bit of a thrill to think that at least a few viewers might be tempted to read something by Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles after The Wire shuts down. They're not as gritty, of course, and are considerably more sytlized and elemental than The Wire, but they are also (in the right translation) eminently direct and readable. Robert Fagles, whose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey were so celebrated in recent years, has also published some well-regarded translations of Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Simon's idea of fate being embodied by social forces rather than wielded by gods isn't new, of course. Another place viewers might go after there's no more Wire is back to the great social realist novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The French novelist Emile Zola wrote from a similar stance, creating dark, complex, HBO-ready stories about ordinary characters made to dance like puppets by social and economic forces. Zola's Rougon-Macquart series of novels follows the effects of the industrial revolution on five generations a family; like The Wire, his novels are large scale, with lots of characters, and full of street slang and carefully observed details (Zola researched his novels like a journalist). I've only read one, Germinal, about a coal miner's strike, but his other masterpieces include Nana, L'Assommoir, and La Bête humaine. If you like Zola, you might also like his American contemporary Frank Norris (who died a month after Zola in 1902, but was 40 years younger), and who left behind at least two memorable realist epics, McTeague, about the rise and fall of a San Francisco dentist, and The Octopus, about the struggle between wheat farmers and a railroad monopoly, a storyline reminiscent of the dockworkers' plotline in season two of The Wire.

There are also the great American realists of the early 20th century, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos. Dreiser, I hope, needs no introduction, but I'll mention An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie for the record. I gather that Lewis is undergoing a bit of a revival after being looked down upon for many years; I read Elmer Gantry, his novel about a shady evangelist, in high school and still remember it pretty vividly. Dos Passos's USA trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money) is sort of modernist lite, with the straight narrative passages interspersed with "newsreel" chapters, basically prose poems concocted from headlines and clips from news stories. As I recall, Dos Passos's trilogy was informed by his Marxism, an ideology which he rejected in later life.

As Simon understood when he hired Pelecanos and Lehane to write for him, a certain type of crime writer also creates narratives in the dark realist tradition, and one of the best is the Scottish writer Denise Mina, who is (along with Louise Welsh, Val McDermid, and others) one of the chief creators of what some people are calling Tartan Noir. I haven't read her earlier trilogy of mysteries yet, but I have read her recent books about the young Glasgow journalist Paddy Meehan, and while the mystery plots themselves are clever, the real appeal of the novels, for me, anyway, is the vivid and exhilerating-in-its-grittiness evocation of Glasgow in the 1980s. Meehan herself is a wonderful creation, a tough young woman from a Catholic family who is struggling to succeed in the almost entirely male, and almost entirely alcoholic, world of Glasgow journalism. The first two Paddy Meehan books are Field of Blood and The Dead Hour, and there's a new one, called The Last Breath in the UK and soon to be released as Slip of the Knife here. After The Wire's over, I may go back and read her Garnethill trilogy, which (so I'm told) has many of the same virtues.

The most Wire-ish recent novel I know of, however, is one I started just last week and am finding entirely engrossing in the same way The Wire is. It's Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, an epic crime saga about cops versus gangsters in contemporary Mumbai (aka Bombay). Chandra's evocation of Mumbai is nearly as thrilling as Simon's Baltimore; there's a detailed description of one cop's kholi (basically, a one-room house where he lives with his wife and two sons) that told me more about everyday life in urban India than any number of documentaries. The cops face the same bureaucratic pressures as Simon's, the criminals as every bit as complex and charismatic, and, it turns out, both cops and criminals in Mumbai are every bit as poetically foul-mouthed as their Baltimore counterparts. There's a very useful glossary, in fact, from which you can learn how to say "motherfucker" in several different South Asian languages (aaiyejhavnaya is one way, if you must know, and maderchod is another). I've only read the first 130 pages, but I'm completely hooked, and it will help me get through the week between each new Wire episode.

And finally, a naked plug for an old Michigan friend of mine, Dean Garrison, who is a crime scene investigator and who has written several self-published crime novels. You can order them at Amazon—his titles are Box Job, Mad Badges, The Blood of Losers, Backstab Blues, and Snowblind Justice—and what they lack in high literary gloss they more than make up for in vividness, verisimilitude, and bitter humor. He's also (just to prove his bona fides) the author of Practical Shooting Scene Investigation, and the closest thing I know personally to a real-life Lester Freamon.

These are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head today; somebody else would probably have a whole different list, and so would I on a different day. But, ten weeks from now, when we're all jonesing like Bubbles in rehab, at least we'll know we have options.

And this just in: Maud Newton, that lucky girl, got to party with the cast of The Wire at the premiere party. What I wouldn't give to have my picture taken with Clarke Peters!

Leave a Reply