The Final Country (Milo Milodragovitch Series #3) Book

I used to be a lover of James Crumley crime novels. Especially ones of the Milo Milodragovitch and C.W. Sughrue hardboiled detectives. And then I evolved I guess, and snobbery became a part of my character, and I tried to be true to my new calling and yet I failed and succumbed to another try at the last great novel composed by James Crumley. He died in 2008, and after many years of my studying and reading cerebral, but essentially feeling works written by Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Samuel Beckett and the like I decided I would take a little break and have some fun with my old pal James Crumley. But as Thomas Wolfe already warned us, "You can't go home again".

I finished it, The Final Country, and put it away on the shelf of things I do want to sell back to Amazon. I was disappointed in the book, and I really shouldn't have been if I were honest with myself. I expected too much. I expected sentences that were constructed artistically, but instead found sentences boring to their core. Straight reportage of chronological events that nobody I currently read would ever produce willfully on the page. I almost put the book down for good, but in deference to Crumley and his life's work, I decided to plow through to the end and be finally completed with him forever. Much as I had already done with the writers Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane who had originally led me to the foothills of the promised land beginning around 1984. But old friends sometimes just have to part ways.

When my wife's mother died several years ago we were in the midst of tearing off the old roof on the house we lived in. Underneath two layers of asphalt shingles was an additional ravaged and dusty layer of cedar shakes nailed much too profusely to the 1x4 pine boards installed horizontal to the roof rafters. It was a messy and unhealthy job removing the debris. The weight and scope of the project can only be imagined here, and I will ask you to do just that. Use your imagination. Dust flew everywhere and when a typical hundred and twenty square foot section was removed it opened our house to any warranted intrusion slash invasion whether it be rain, bugs, birds, or an awkwardly errant leg. The morning when word came that her mother had died an eight foot wide section, peak to base, had already been opened to the world and thrown down to the ground. There was no other option available but to close up the space between the existing 1x4 wood slats with new lumber, apply tar paper, shingle the newly prepared area, and tarp over the remaining gap between old and new as usual. That took time. That also meant I had to watch my wife make trips back and forth to the dumpster with armload after armload of dirty shingles, tar paper, and nails, not to mention her trips up and down the ladder bringing me as many new shingles as she could possibly handle at one time, given her non-girth and warmly attractive, but somewhat ectomorphic, frame.

Besides installing the new roof shingles my job was tearing off and throwing down to the ground the crap she had to haul like a mule, her tears watering down the rising storm of dust surrounding her, almost-continuous wet cries and sobs coming from her dry throat and chest sometimes louder than the moving traffic. And in that period of her enormously fresh and profound grief I noticed all the cars on the street below us continuing on their way to and fro, hither and yon, never slowing down or stopping in reverence to her abruptly dead mother. In short, life went on. It was a very sad awakening to what the world was really about, and I didn't like it one bit. But accept it we did, and like others, we moved on. That is how I feel about James Crumley. He worked hard and it is hoped, as well as supposed, that he had some fun along the way. A writer as small and inconsequential as the measure of a James Crumley can only hope to matter to the world for the duration of his popular time. But if you think a few moves ahead and look at the bigger picture, isn't it more important to attempt to make literary history if immortality is wanted alongside your good name? And this heaven for writers, that place ahead for The Mighty Dead, is where I am sad to say as a place-setter he will never be found. But some could say it was fun while it lasted.