In Nine Kinds of Pain, Leonard Fritz offers a Detroit back story too many of us have come to ignore; how and what and why an impoverished city is permitted to rot as if walled in from the rest of our world. He uses characters on both sides of the law to portray the hell of trying to survive hell; an alcoholic priest on the edge, in love with a prostitute the way Jesus loved Mary Magdalene; a suicidal cop in love with his wife the way a cuckold can’t get enough abuse; the prostitute seeking shelter from a killer in the arms of the church (wherein that priest falls in love – or is it much needed lust?). There’s the city itself, the cloud of doom hovering over each and all the characters in the city of Detroit as told by an omniscient voice of wisdom providing both warning and grace to the understandably (or not) naive.
Beware, for instance, the Devil’s Night. Fritz offers more than the advertised thriller in this economic gem. Social issues abound; from drugs to poverty to marital discord, suicide, loss of faith, faith in loss … you name it, this book swoops in and out of the issues of our day. I was two hundred pages into a best-selling novel I’m reading for my MFA class when the ARC for the Fritz book was close at hand. I started reading and didn’t stop. I’ll go back to the funny best-seller later, I decided. In Nine Kinds of Pain was way too gripping and more my kind of a read to have to wait another four hundred pages of very well crafted humour.
Fritz strategically places graphic cartoon-like strips in this work. As one who never read (or is ever likely to read) a graphic novel, they surprised me. I thought them brilliant. Last year’s Pulitzer Prize winning fiction (A Visit from the Goon Squad
) also used graphics (including a Power Point presentation). I suspect A Visit from the Goon Squad didn’t work for me because of the bands/music references I just wasn’t aware of. In any event, I took three tries at the prize winner and never finished reading it. No knock on the book; it just wasn’t for me. Reading In Nine Kinds of Pain, I was quickly absorbed, and the third time I’ll read this one, it’ll be because I reread most books I find to be extra special.
Lenny Fritz, a modern day Hubert Selby Jr./Jack Kerouac, has written a gem. It isn’t Elmore Leonard’s Detroit. It’s darker, it’s colder, it isn’t guised in clever dialogue that makes us smile; this dialogue is the real and gritty deal. In a word, it’s better. Hats off to New Pulp Press for this discovery and this gift to us all.
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