Thomas Zigal

Thoughts and Suggestions

My old friend April Smith has written a wonderful new article for PowellsBooks.Blog about the behavior and expectations of writers in the early 1970s versus now. April's new Ana Grey mystery is entitled Judas Horse. This is a superb series. Read them!


Reviews


Pralines and Prejudice

Thomas Zigal's The White League
A review by Jeff Salamon

AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 20, 2005

Writing is not necessarily a fungible activity. Drafting a legal brief doesn't qualify you to pen a limerick. Aaron Sorkin never wrote a Homeric ode worth a damn. Herman Melville couldn't come up with a fast-food slogan to save his life.

So props to Austin's Thomas Zigal, an accomplished mystery writer who is also a poet and a literary critic, and currently works as a speechwriter for University of Texas President Larry Faulkner. Toss in a onetime aspiration to the title of Great American Novelist, and you've got yourself an all-purpose scrivener.

A few years ago, Zigal made his name in the mystery world with a series of books about Kurt Muller, a sheriff in Zigal's former home of Aspen, Colo. But his latest book, "The White League," finds this restless writer changing stripes once again; it's set in New Orleans, another former home.

Zigal, a native Texan, lived in the Big Easy for only four years, but he seems to have soaked up plenty of culture and history while he was there. "The White League" isn't just an enormously entertaining read, it's deeply steeped in the city's history of race and class. It's a mystery novel, for sure, but a mystery novel by a guy who never seems to have abandoned his ambition to write the Great American Novel.

The first-person narrator of "The White League" is Paul Blanchard, a well-to-do heir to a local coffee fortune. The year is 1990, and Paul is experiencing a sense of mid-life drift that'll be familiar to frequent readers of post-war American fiction: He's bored at work, feeling his way through his marriage's loss of sexual passion and nagged by the suspicion that he doesn't deserve the adoration of his two young children.

So far, so Updike. But Zigal lifts things out of the slough of domestic drama by introducing Paul's old fraternity brother, Congressman Mark Morvant, a thinly veiled doppelganger for Louisiana's real-life white supremacist David Duke. Like Duke circa 1990, Morvant is trying to claw his way to respectability. He has undergone cosmetic surgery that makes him look conventionally handsome and has traded in the N-word for code words such as "our birthright."

By choice, Paul hasn't seen Morvant in years, so when the congressman shows up at his home one afternoon, he fears the worst -- and gets it. Morvant has decided to make a run for the governorship, and he wants Paul's help: a chunk of the Blanchard family fortune in campaign contributions and Paul's assistance in winning the support of The White League, a shadowy, perhaps mythical group of men who Morvant claims have been pulling the strings in New Orleans for generations.

Though Morvant assumes that Paul is a member of the League, Paul in fact knows nothing about the group. But his protestations are futile. Not only doesn't Morvant believe him, he knows a secret that forces Paul to do his bidding: Decades ago, when they were in college, Morvant helped Paul get rid of the body of a young woman who died, under scandalous circumstances, on the Blanchard property. If Paul doesn't do his bidding now, Morvant threatens to reveal everything and bring Paul's comfortable, if hollow, life crashing down. (There's a glaring hole in the otherwise well-constructed plot that Zigal never addresses: If Morvant reveals Paul's secret, wouldn't he reveal his own hand in the sordid affair, and thereby ruin his own political aspirations?)

Half-convinced he's on a fool's errand, Paul begins a search for the League that forces him to face the city's seamy underside, which he has spent most of his life looking away from.

Along the way, we meet Paul's beloved maid, Rosetta Jarboe; her son Jaren, who is serving 30 years in prison; Paul's wife, Claire Benjamin, a descendant of New Orleans' Jewish elite; his sister, Kathleen, whose quasi-racist politics never quite alienate him (perhaps because he's well aware that he has never let his more-enlightened attitudes cost him anything); and his gay brother, Perry, with whom he has a distant relationship.

We're also dipped into the racial politics of New Orleans -- the men's social clubs, where bigotry lingers like cigar smoke, and the segregated Mardi Gras Carnival "krewes."

This is, in short, a novel of manners -- New Orleans, with its iron-clad racial strictures and ossified class structure, being perhaps the last major American city where a traditional novel of manners could be set. Zigal captures this particularly well during a dinner party at the Blanchard home, where the guests blithely, and with barely a racial fig leaf, discuss "The Crime Problem" -- while being served by a retinue of black servants. Outside their doors, a black policeman watches over their cars for some extra cash.

All of which seems oppressive and inescapable -- to both the reader and to Paul, who is too passive to do anything about it. "Did we ever truly escape our parents and who they wanted us to be?" he wonders. "The older I got, the more I became like them in small hideous ways."

The rub, of course, is that by 1990, New Orleans was finally on the brink of change. At the time, in both the novel and real life, the city had already elected its first black mayor. And The White League had finally met its match: Wilhelmina Phillips, a black city councilwoman who pushes to integrate the social clubs and Carnival krewes.

Zigal skillfully weaves all this together -- high society, low crime, racial tensions, city politics, backroom skullduggery, sibling rivalries -- with a sure hand. (Though his inclusion of Balzac's observation that "Behind every great fortune lies a hidden crime" as an epigraph is a rare misstep. Thirty-five years after Mario Puzo cited this bit of wisdom at the outset of "The Godfather," it has permanently hardened into cliché.) Toward the end, the book even provides a couple of last-minute surprises that not only make this a first-class mystery but also tell us something important -- revelatory, but hardly implausible -- about Paul and the people around him.

The only thing that keeps "The White League" from being completely successful as more than a very accomplished entertainment (a status that its observations about race and class elevate it above) is the steadiness of Paul's voice. Though Paul and the reader are well aware of his desperation, the first-person narrative never falters. Even as he sinks to depths we thought beneath him, Paul remains a likable, self-deprecating companion.

Still, most mystery novels would give their McGuffin to be held to such standards. "The White League" is a satisfying mystery novel, but it's something else, too: a Really Good American Novel, period.

jsalamon@statesman.com; 445-3610


Bad Doings in the Big Easy

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News
March 20, 2005


Racial hatred rests uncomfortably at the roots of American history, a cancer lurking just beneath the surface of who we are. Thomas Zigal's page-turning novel The White League presents this condition in microcosm as its flawed hero, a wealthy New Orleans coffee magnate, goes digging through his city's past in an effort to ward off demons from his own.

His name is Paul Blanchard, a decent, go-along-to-get-along rich man with a nasty skeleton in his closet and a bayou-sized burden on his conscience. Years earlier, a white supremacist frat brother named Mark Morvant helped Paul out of a bad jam. Now the frat brother has grown up to be a dangerous man with his eyes on the governorship. He wants Paul's patronage; more than that, he wants Paul to deliver the support of a shadowy white power operation called The White League, thought to have faded away decades ago. Paul's family may have White League connections, and Morvant is ready to play blackmail if Paul doesn't procure the League's backing.

Mr. Zigal, an Austin resident with Louisiana roots, has written a whip-smart novel with a vivid sense of place and a finely detailed gallery of characters. The White League is a crime novel of sorts, but it transcends the confines of genre fiction while maintaining the narrative thrust of a classic detective story.

Paul is engaging enough to root for (especially given his opponents), but compromised enough to keep our interest. Far more progressive than his peers and enemies, he remains haunted by the blood on his hands, and he knows he's largely responsible for the incarceration of his childhood friend and the heartbreak of the guy's mother, Paul's former nanny.

Mr. Zigal deftly interweaves Paul's crisis and quest for White League info with tidbits of New Orleans history and political intrigue. He also juggles a vast assortment of secondary characters, including Paul's gay brother, Perry, who knows a little something about that November Dallas afternoon in 1963; Kathleen, Paul's sister, on intimate terms with Paul's blackmailer; and James Castle, a veteran black cop who seems to know Paul has something to hide.

It all unfolds under a dark shadow of secrecy, stage managed by good ol' boys eager to see the Old South rise again. The conspiracy elements aren't always believable, nor is Paul's occasional gullibility in the face of terror. But the parts click together smoothly, and the atmosphere is as thick and sticky as a New Orleans summer day. The White League is a crisp evocation of ghosts swept under the rug but never exorcised, always ready to remind us of former sins.