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"The long ruminations of Mr. White…give the book its intensity and mystery. "
——The New Yorker
"As thrilling as it is unnerving…Could have been written by Dashiell Hammett or James Crumley--at their best. "
——Greil Marcus, Esquire
"Strong, brooding…Clark’s most striking achievement is Herbert’s ambiguity, making it appear at once vulnerable and threatening. "
——Dan Cryer, Newsday
"Complex…intriguing…a fascinating and timely journey into the American psyche. "
——Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Seattle Times
"A novel of substance…reveals the subtlety of [Robert Clark’s] artistry and the profundity of his vision. "
——Merle Rubin, The Wall Street Journal
In Robert Clark's second novel, Mr. White's Confession, two men grope through real and metaphysical mysteries in post-depression Minnesota. A pair of girls, taxi dancers at a local dance hall, have been murdered. It seems obvious to everyone involved that the killer is Herbert White, a quiet eccentric with a taste for glamour photography--particularly after portraits of the dead women are found in his apartment. Yet police Lieutenant Wesley Horner finds himself obsessed with the oddities of the case, starting with the fact that the suspect is afflicted with a faulty memory. Literally unable to recall anything but the distant past (and intermittent patches of the present), White cannot confess to the murders. Did he in fact commit the crime, or is he merely a convenient scapegoat? Agonizing over these questions, Horner also begins to ponder the role that memory plays in understanding the past--and the present.
Part of the narrative consists of Herbert White's journal, and this is the best part of Mr. White's Confession. Here Clark creates a voice that is both innocent and formal and, most of all, blind to its own desires. Recalling a visit by Ruby Fahey, one of the eventual victims, the photographer writes: "She went back to my bedroom to change, and I must say I felt a huge sort of breathlessness at the idea that she was in my room shedding and then donning her garments, rather as if some mystery of great enormity were taking place right here in my humble quarters!" Horner's half of the narrative, alas, is weighted down by tired lyricism, and populated by a hard-boiled cast straight out of Raymond Chandler. The result is a gripping mystery with an anticlimactic ending--less a philosophical resolution than the tail of a shaggy-dog story. --Emily Hall --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
By opening with a long epigraph from St. Augustine's Confessions (in the original Latin, no less), Clark's ambitious, atmospheric rumination on good, evil and the gray area in between announces intentions far loftier than those of the standard dime-store detective novels to which the book bears an intentional but superficial resemblance. Set in St. Paul, Minn., in the bleak winter of 1939, this high-brow thriller retains enough lowdown grit and grime to qualify as both a suspenseful read and a surprisingly touching character study. When two young "dime-a-dance" girls are murdered, tough-as-nails homicide cop Lieutenant Wesley Horner hones in on eccentric recluse and amateur photographer Herbert White as the prime suspect. Looking like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and Paul Bunyan, and equally obsessed with Hollywood starlet Veronica Galvin and the voluminous scrapbooks and journals he keeps in order to compensate for his (narratively convenient) memory loss, White takes the fall with sympathetic dignity: astute readers will have fingered the real culprit many pages earlier. The true mysteries here are psychological: Horner's morally suspect relationship with teenage drifter Maggie is particularly fascinating. Having previously written a biography of James Beard (The Solace of Food), a cultural history of the Columbia River (River of the West) and a critically lauded first novel (In the Deep Midwinter), Clark here seesaws, most often successfully, between hard-boiled cliches and an earnest, self-conscious concern with the natures of memory and love. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --
From Publishers Weekly
BY CHARLES TAYLOR | Everything about "Mr. White's Confession" is in flux -- the story, the setting, even the author's style. What begins as an atmospheric hard-boiled crime yarn ends up as something much more mysterious and unsettling. Clark steadily builds up an all-but-overwhelming sense of dread, a certainty that the worst we fear will arrive on schedule -- only to pull the rug out from under us.
St. Paul, Minn., in 1939, the place and time the book opens, has a ghost-town feel. The characters are part of the crowds on the streets or riding the buses, at the movies or eating at the local White Castle; they could be the last people on earth. "Today passed uneventfully," one character writes in his journal, "although I varied my routine somewhat, leaving the house earlier than usual and walking down the Lawton Steps to catch the Grand Avenue streetcar instead of my regular route." The proprietor of a dime-a-dance hall talks about how times are getting better. It doesn't feel that way. As "Pennies from Heaven" did, "Mr. White's Confession" presents a world of shabby, middle-class gentility perched on top of awful secrets.
Someone is murdering St. Paul's dime-a-dance girls, and both evidence and instinct lead the police to Herbert White. An odd loner with a Humpty Dumpty build and a faulty memory (he can recall things that happened years before, but the recent past is a blur), Herbert spends hours on his journal and scrapbook, trying to record the events he knows will soon slip from his mind. He's also drawn to pretty women, writing fawning fan letters to his favorite starlet and photographing dance-hall girls in demure poses. Herbert's doughy politeness, his remove from the world, seems at first a cover for an overage virgin's boiling hostility. But as Herbert goes from born culprit to born patsy, even that transformation doesn't take the full measure of his character, the way his infuriating obstinacy, his inability to perceive more than what's in front of him, signifies a kind of decency and integrity, even though that failure prevents him from saving himself.
Clark's slowly unfolding irony is that each character shares something of Herbert's myopia, and they're even less able to save themselves. The dime-a-dance girls, the cops working the case, a teenage runaway who becomes both the wife and daughter one cop has lost -- all of them remain essentially isolated. And that realization, breaking like a slow wave across the length of the book, leaves a chill that persists.
At times, Clark's approach feels less unpredictable than unformed. He's using genre borrowings for a novel more fluid and resonant than genre conventions usually allow, and it's not a seamless blend. (His conscientiously descriptive prose occasionally seems too fancy for the material, an attempt to put on airs.) But the book's elusiveness pulls you in. The mystery of who killed the girls has a solution that's obvious early on; the mystery of where Clark's characters are headed has no easy solution, though their destinations seem obvious. The unexpected compassion he shows his characters is finally much more unsettling than the irreversible fates we're certain await them. Maybe that has something to do with their refusal to stay boxed up within a genre. By the end of "Mr. White's Confession," they've traveled awfully far, and awfully close.
SALON | Sept. 2, 1998
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