The Sweet ForeverGeorge P Pelecanos
Serpent’s Tail paperback, 298 pages, £9.99
Now available as a Serpent’s Tail Five Star paperback, in WH Smiths, even.
Review by David Clark (1999)
Pelecanos’ regular protagonist Nick Stefanos turns bit player in the new, altogether darker, bleaker The Sweet Forever. Marcus Clay and Dimitri Karras (from King Suckerman, like some other characters here) open a Real Right Records, a new store in a bad part of town, the town being Pelecanos’ usual stomping ground, Washington DC. In 1986, ten years on from King Suckerman, and life is cheap.
Some stolen drug cash is the MacGuffin, in a rush of violence and tenderness in a city full of bent cops, teen gangs, and coke; a coke and hooker preoccupied mayor, the man who took the money, the gang who own it, the locals trapped in the middle.
The Sweet Forever is a complex book with no central character (though there are various appearances by members of the casts of previous novels), but it’s never complicated. Everyone more or less knows where the $25,000 is, so this is more about recovery, causing either the least suffering possible or finding moral absolution in extreme violence. Children shoot each other and are murdered in turn by the drug gangsters they would have grown up to become. Detailed. Addiction, broken marriages, cars, basketball.
And Pelecanos knows his music too; the soundtrack album would be great, a mix of classic soul and rock. Pelecanos is something else; he knows how to write and he’ll go far. This vivid slice of American life is one of his best, if not the best. So far.