The Turnaround by George Pelecanos Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Turnaround
Book Review: Well written, didn't exactly like the ending..
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this book because I heard an advertisement for it on the radio and I'm a big fan of the television show The Wire on HBO. Pelecanos has written a wonderful book. His descriptions are crisp and concise, not overly fancy or superfluous. You can tell he knows his subject in many areas (running a diner, stereo hi-fi, cars). I really felt like I was *in* most of the scenes as an up-close observer, especially with certain characters. The relationships feel real. It is still a sad reflection on race in America, but heartfelt. I did not care for the ending too much, but it doesn't take away from the style of the book at all.Book Review: What a writer !
Summary: 5 Stars
when you begin this book. It's really a big challenge to stop. Everything is brilliant: writing. psychology, atmosphere. In my dream,I would like to be able to wrote a book like that.Book Review: Without moralizing, George Pelecanos forces us to pause and reflect on the consequences that flow from an instant of violence
Summary: 5 Stars
It's a hot summer afternoon in 1972 in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Three white teenagers, bored and stoned, cruise the streets, aimlessly seeking relief from the tedium. They drive into a poor black neighborhood, ironically named Heathrow Heights. For fun, one decides to toss a cherry pie, splattering a teenage resident of the neighborhood. Minutes later, the driver lies dead of a bullet wound, one passenger is severely beaten and six lives are altered forever.
Acclaimed as one of America's most thoughtful crime novelists, George Pelecanos continues to stretch the boundaries of his genre to explore the moral dimensions of human action in his latest novel, THE TURNAROUND. It's an absorbing story likely to burnish his reputation with his loyal fans and expose him to a wider audience.
Alex Pappas is one of the young men in the car who enters Heathrow Heights on the fateful afternoon. When the novel fast forwards to 2007, he's the 51-year-old owner of a modest coffee shop near DuPont Circle he's been running since age 19, when his father died of a heart attack. Alex's younger son, Gus, has been killed in Iraq and he's grooming his older son, John, to take over the family business.
Every afternoon, Alex quietly delivers pies and desserts to the wounded veterans at Walter Reed Medical Center. On one of those visits he encounters Raymond Monroe, a physical therapist at the hospital whose own son has been deployed to Afghanistan. When Monroe discovers that Pappas, like him, was involved in the Heathrow Heights incident, he seeks him out, taking the first tentative steps toward reconciliation after 35 years. Raymond's older brother, James, sentenced to 10 years in prison (bloated to 20 for his misconduct there) for shooting Alex's friend, the driver, works as a mechanic in a nondescript auto repair shop. Raymond struggles to persuade his reluctant brother to let the past surrender its hold on him.
Charles Baker, who inflicted a beating that caused permanent damage to Alex's eye, lives on the fringes of the law, working fitfully at a menial job in a nursing home. He has hooked up with two teenagers running a small drug dealing operation and is looking for the big score --- whether it's a chance to muscle out their supplier or to blackmail Alex or the other occupant of the car, who fled the scene and now has become a prominent Washington lawyer recognized for his work helping minorities.
Pelecanos skillfully creates an atmosphere of foreboding as the five survivors of the Heathrow Heights incident head toward a denouement that feels at some times as if it may be cataclysmic and at others redemptive. His ability to sustain this tension to the end of the novel is a testament to his skill in creating both credible characters and a plausible plot. Sympathetic without yielding to sentimentality, he draws sharp contrasts between characters like Alex and Raymond, who've managed to carve out respectable middle class lives, and those like Charles Baker and James Monroe, for whom the burden of bad choices shadows their every action.
A native of Washington who happens to be roughly the same age as the principal characters of the novel, Pelecanos is adept at capturing the atmosphere of working class life there, both in the 1970s and today. Beyond possessing an intimate knowledge of his setting, he has a knack for invoking the music, clothing, hairstyles and cars that associate the characters with a particular era or social class.
Each day, the media offer up fresh stories of violent crime. Soon, the details of these events fade from our memories and we're unlikely to spend much time pondering their permanent impact on perpetrators, victims and their families. Without moralizing, George Pelecanos forces us to pause and reflect on the consequences that flow from an instant of thoughtless violence. That he does so in the form of a page-turning novel makes his achievement all the more impressive.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
Book Review: Wow was this good
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently read the detective novel "Shame the Devil" by George Pelecanos. While I generally liked it, there was something missing, something that wasn't quite right. It was good, but I felt it could have been better. I wasn't sure how it could be improved, only that I thought that there was something about the book that could stand improvement. After reading the latest offering from Pelecanos, "The Turnaround", I now know what the problem was, at least for me. "Shame the Devil" is a detective novel; Pelecanos writes a serviceable one; "The Turnaround", by contrast, is a crime novel. There's no real detective in the plot, and not much of a mystery if you're paying attention. Instead, there's a great story, and that makes all the difference. "Shame the Devil" is a good book; "The Turnaround" is one of the best books I've read in years, steeped in atmosphere and character, and a very good book.
"The Turnaround" starts with a racial incident in the early 1970s in Washington D.C., where all of Pelecanos' books are set. Apparently he also has stuck with Greek main characters, for some reason. The Pappas family, the center of the book, runs a diner in downtown, feeding the breakfast and lunch crowd. The center of the book, at the start, is the family patriarch, John. He runs the business cannily, and hopes that one day one of his sons will take over the restaurant. Instead, one of his sons is involved in a racial incident, in which there are epithets yelled, and someone gets killed. Fast forward three and a half decades, a new generation runs the store, and those who were involved in the incident are either back from prison or reminded of it somehow. They have different agendas, and want different things, and how this plays out is the main part of the book.
"The Turnaround" is steeped in three things, all of them very intrinsic to the book, and all of them very well-done. The author is clearly obsessed with music, one of these guys that can tell you who wrote a song, who first released it, who covered it, which version was popular, etc. He creates the atmosphere of the early 70s in Washington through the music, and oddly through the stereo equipment that it's played on. One of the more amusing incidents in the book occurs when one of the young men in the story relates that his friend has a stereo with "Bosay" speakers, only to be corrected by his brother, who tells him that it's pronounced "Bose". The music is a part of the longer, more modern part of the book too, with the newer artists contrasting with the older ones.
A second aspect of the book which is carefully covered, which adds to the overall story, is the operation of the diner. The author clearly knows someone who has worked in a diner; perhaps his family had one growing up. This was a big part of the sub-plot of "Shame the Devil" too, so I'm wondering if it's going to be a common thread through all of Pelecanos' books. The author spends a lot of time with his characters running the restaurant, letting the cook try new ideas for recipes and weekly specials, that sort of thing. It's an intelligent and interesting sidelight to the main plot.
Third, and lastly, the character of Washington D.C. is a considerable part of the book. This isn't the Washington that's our nation's capitol, really. None of the characters visit any of the monuments or memorials, let alone government buildings, much. The main character in "Shame the Devil" had lunch at the Supreme Court's cafeteria. Apparently this is an insider thing to do: the food there is very good, and it's open to the public. Beyond that though, none of the characters I've encountered so far are government employees in any serious fashion. There's no FBI investigation or anything like that. The city the author deals with is more crime-ridden, and at the same time more mundane, than the one we think of.
I really enjoyed "The Turnaround" in case you couldn't tell. I've already gone looking for more of Pelecanos' books. If they're anything like "Shame the Devil" instead, it's not so bad, but this was a really good book. Highly recommended.
Book Review: a literary page turner
Summary: 5 Stars
Pelecanos latest novel, The Turnaround, is more than a crime novel. It's a well-written tour through the lives of what happened in the lives of 6 men involved in a thoughtless violent act when they were boys.
Some are more successful than the others, one continues a life of crime and violence, but all of them try to make some peace with their childhood and "the incident" as they call it.
The turnaround was a page-turner that reminded me of Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, but better. I started it this afternoon and finished it just now, before bed. Highly recommended.