In one of the four boffo novellas that constitute Owning Up: New Fiction by crime novelist George Pelecanos (The Cut; The Double), a character recalls a film-critic friend's definition of film noir: "Nothing is going to be all right, ever." This may be true for many of Pelecanos's characters, but damned if they aren't at least trying to achieve more than the often precious little expected of them.
In one novella, a white convict is inspired to pursue acting by a Black convict he meets at a Washington, D.C., jail's book club. In another story, a successful author of books on police corruption fears that his work puts a target on his troubled son's back. A story beginning in the early 1980s finds a previously aimless woman trying to write a historical novel about a real-life D.C. theater tragedy. And in the title story, a Black man has a destiny-altering influence on a morally unformed white teenager who works with him at an appliance store.
Pelecanos's novellas are marvels of economy and compression while also managing to be cerebral and intricate. He wears his politics more visibly than did the old noir writers he clearly admires: his stories touch on racism, xenophobia, and other social impediments to getting ahead. Another occasional obstacle: the sort of hedonistic attitude that one character sums up as "We're all going to die, so what's the point of working?" Cruelly, it's the characters in Owning Up who resist moral laxity that have the bumpiest rides of all. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer