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No good could come from analyzing my life. Introspection was for people with interesting lives and money.
I moved to Montreal three months shy of turning 20. I remember the distinct feeling of elation walking the street of a real city. A city that was built and destroyed and built again, covered in concrete and inhabited by people who were so different from me. That feeling is a little bit like clicking with a new author, there is excitement, a looming sense of danger and a sense of freedom you can't get used to. I clicked with Johnny Shaw's pen reading his first novel DOVE SEASON, a finalist for the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Noel Award. Recklessly standing on one foot, trying to maintain a healthy balance between crime drama and bildungsroman, DOVE SEASON comes off as a clever, perceptive, patient and most important: unique. There isn't any writer out there who could sound like Johnny Shaw, even if they tried.
DOVE SEASON is the story of Jimmy Veeder, a 30 year old college graduate with an American Literature degree *, coming back home in the Imperial Valley after learning his father Jack only had a few years to live. The old man hid his disease from his only son until this final days. Now that the fight is lost, Jack has one final request for his son: find a Mexican prostitute named Yolanda. In the Imperial Valley, it's as easy as finding a goldfish in the Pacific Ocean. Jimmy loves his old man though and accepts the challenge like bro. He enlists his boyhood friend Bobby Maves, a half-Mexican with a white pompadour and an attitude problem to help him search for Yolanda. The Imperial Valley will welcome back Jimmy and send Jack the way it deals with its own.
The prose of Johnny Shaw is the showstopper in DOVE SEASON. His sentences are patienty crafted, beautiful kinetic objects that'll transport you into the Imperial Valley using your five senses. There is a tremendous sense of place that is communicated through the first person narration. It's so good, it takes precedence on the genre tropes in DOVE SEASON. It is a novel about the Imperial Valley and its way before being a straight shooting crime fiction book. Scottish madman Ray Banks blurbed DOVE SEASON and compared it to Joe Lansdale's Hap & Leonard series and I would say it's accurate. The strong, visual and personable first person narration of an intellectual living in a rough world is as seducing as Lansdale's albeit Johnny Shaw's Imperial Valley and Joe Lansdale's East Texas are different planets.
I used the silence to try and absorb the fact that I was going to find a hooker for my dying father. The few seconds weren't nearly enough. I had the feeling I was going to need a few years.
Then Bobby's voice roared from my phone, ''Your dad is fucking awesome. I am so in on this. Beats the shit out of bringing flowers. Jack wants a piece, let's tear him off some conch.
DOVE SEASON got interesting very early for me due to clever and thorough characterization. I was won by page 10. I'll admit the prose is sometimes overanalytical, but when an author has already won me over, I can deal with that. For example, Johnny Shaw will describe a sad and pathetic scene where Jimmy Veeder refused to take advantage of a girl and finish that scene with a thesis statement: ''she was so sad and pathetic.'' It's narrative overkill and I can understand it bugged some people, but I think the good outweighted the bad by about a metric fuckton in that regard.
Same for the plot. I was browsing through the Amazon reviews of DOVE SEASON and found several complaints about the lack of plot. I disagree with those critics. I believe there is a plot in DOVE SEASON, but it doesn't only include crime elements, there are several coming-of-age variables also and the beauty of it is how these two unlikely aspects intertwine to give a unique story. I'll concede that the plot doesn't exactly have a fifth gear, though, an overdrive where everybody was suddenly threatened like in Dennis Lehane's Kenzie & Gennaro novels for example. It remains controlled, yet Johnny Shaw has a knack for throwing minor yet unpredictable twists into the storyline.
DOVE SEASON is a remarkable first novel because it creates a unique paradigm. You can trace Johnny Shaw's influence to Joe Lansdale, Elmore Leonard and the rugged poets of place, yet there is a much of his Imperial Valley you have never seen before. His characters are contemporary boys lost in an ageless world. Jimmy Veeder is a complex, realistic protagonist living in between two world, where law and reality are in the eye of the beholder. DOVE SEASON was excellent. I finished it with the nagging feeling it could've been a bit more, yet I could not put the finger on what underwhelmed me exactly. Whatever it was, it was minor. Consider me a new fan of Johnny Shaw. He is one of the strongest new voice in American crime fiction.
* I guess I understand better why it hit home now that I have read this sentence.
