tl;dr

Jazz, axe-related murders and the Spanish Flu – a vibrant look at New Orleans in 1918.

opening remarks

Simon Rich is not only a short story writer and creator of the absurdist hit and miss TV show Man Seeking Woman, but he also looks a bit like Harry Potter.  King Zeno is a novel by his (lesser known)* brother Nathaniel.

*That’s a lie, in the literary world he has plenty of cred.

knee-jerk observations

I don’t think I’m over-stating matters when I say that this is the best rat-related simile I’ve come across:

Rich first provides us with a unique rat simile and now follows it up with an unexpected Dorian Gray metaphor.  Mind you, it’s just like a man to put all his burdens on a woman.

King Zeno is set in New Orleans in 1918 and is told from the perspectives of a cop Bill Bastrop and a jazz musician Isadore Zeno.

Bastrop and his fellow officers are on the hunt for a negro highwayman holding-up citizens, taking their money and, if there’s any trouble, shooting them.  Isadore, not yet able to make a living as a cornetist, happens to be working alongside the highwayman as his look-out.

Isadore is beginning to have real doubts about working with Bailey, partly because being the sidekick to a highwayman is taking him away from being a jazz musician but mostly because Bailey has just shot and killed a cop and all this shooting and killing is not what Isadore signed up for.  He was only looking to supplement his paltry income, not be involved in a murder spree.

After the cops arrest Frank Bailey, Isadore, hoping the highwayman won’t finger him as an accomplice, goes to work for Hercules Construction.  The company has been awarded the contract to build a commercial canal that will “make New Orleans the world’s greatest port again”.

Most of the labourers on the massive project are people of colour.  They work is shit and get paid something similar.

As Isadore and the other labourers dig the pit, they come across tree stumps that need to be pulled out.  Sore Dick’s explanation of what the stumps are, where they come from, is a fine piece of writing:

We are introduced to a third voice about a fifth of the way through the novel, Beatrice Vizzini the Matriarch of the Vizzini crime family.  They own Hercules Construction, the company that’s now digging the canal, a crowning glory for the Vizzini family:

Rich pulls out all the stops describing Isadore playing the cornet in front of a large crowd:

This paragraph about sums up Bill Bastrop.  Haunted by the First World War, guilty he survived the collapse of a trench that killed most of his mates, unwilling to accept the mantle of ‘hero’ when he knows all he did was survive.  He is now hounded by one of the survivors who Bill left for dead:

The novel is broken up into three sections, each prefaced by a newspaper report from the time.  The first section concentrated on the highwayman and his murdering ways.  The stories that introduce the second section are also centred on a murderer – this time an axe-wielding psychopath:

Those articles also refer to the coming of the Spanish Flu, which arrived on the shores of New Orleans, via a steamer, in September 1918.

That’s some potent mud:

There are some lovely insights in this novel, astute observations just like this one:

Even throughout the horror that was the Spanish Flu, hospitals had the wherewithal to segregate their black and white patients (and the men and women):

A novel about a psychotic axman murdering the citizens of New Orleans and an out of control flu murdering the citizens of New Orleans is tempered by Isadore’s ecstasy for playing jazz:

Toward the end of the novel, there’s this horrible yet hilarious courtroom scene involving a sedated dog, the uniform of a New Orleans police officer and an inconsolable child.

To explain, Frank Bailey – the highwayman – is on trial for murdering a cop.  To ascertain whether the burn patterns examined by the coroner can be replicated a doped-up dog is brought into Court – his name is Barko – and dressed in the murdered cops spare uniform.  An officer is about to shoot the dog when the daughter of the dead cop bursts into tears, not wanting the dog to be killed.  It’s a moment so ludicrous, so insane it can only be true:

The Gist Of It

It’s only when I did a Wikipedia search on ‘New Orleans’ and ‘1918’ that I truly appreciated Nathaniel Rich’s King Zeno.  He takes three significant events from the year – the flowering of Jazz (born in 1917), the arrival of the Spanish Flu by boat and the psychotic ministrations of the Axman, a serial killer who murdered and injured 12 people… with an axe – and ties them together with a bow.  What may have made his job a tad easier is a letter purportedly written by the Axman – a cut-down version of which features in the novel – where the murderer espouses his love for Jazz.  It’s a connection that shouts to be fleshed out, and that’s precisely what Rich does, spinning a narrative that identifies the Axman (like The Ripper the Axman was never found) and explains how Jazz transitioned from the niche to the mainstream.

It makes for a fascinating and often thrilling read as we are introduced to wannabe Jazz King Isadore Zeno, haunted and obsessed cop Bill Bastrop and the Matriarch of the Vizzini crime family, Beatrice (and her hulking son Giorgio).  All three are fictional, which gives Rich the room to invent his version of the events of 1918, but they are drawn with such care and appreciation for the time and place that I did keep checking Wikipedia to see if they existed, or figure out who they were based on.

The novel does more than bring together particular events of the year. Given the subject matter, it centres on race, especially regarding law enforcement and the prevailing view that a black man was always guilty.  But it also focuses on the construction of the Industrial Canal (another significant event of 1918) which changed the shape of the city forever, making it prone to flooding.  If the canal split the communities of New Orleans apart, it’s Jazz that brought them together, even if only for a very brief moment.

Yes, I did enjoy King Zeno.  A very smart, but also heartfelt book about the city that gave us Jazz.