How Jordan Harper Reinvented Noir for the Epstein Era
As I approached the end of Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece,” this year’s buzzy crime novel, I was surprised—slightly disoriented, even—by the presence of an unexpected feeling on the page: hope. The feeling is unexpected because of all that has come before it, including in “Everybody Knows,” Harper’s previous novel, to which “A Violent Masterpiece” is a sequel of sorts (though perfectly readable on its own). The world of these books is a bleak, fallen one: a grotesque, Day-Glo Los Angeles where the rich and powerful do whatever they want, aided by armies of flunkies and stacks of N.D.A.s. Both stories burst at the seams with corrupt cops and politicians, private mercenaries, concierge peddlers of drugs and sex and plastic surgery, lawyers who stop charges from sticking, and “black-bag publicists” who stop dirt from surfacing. One central character is a monster clearly cobbled together from recent-ish headlines of American depravity: part Weinstein, part Epstein. (In “A Violent Masterpiece,” he quickly winds up dead in jail.) The novels’ Boschian background is full of people whom the powerful no longer have any need for, or never cared about in the first place—discarded child actors, assistants who couldn’t hack it, addicts who live in encampments.
Harper has been widely fêted by both critics and his fellow crime writers. (“Everybody Knows” was, according to the detective novelist Michael Connelly, “the book everybody’s been waiting for.”) When “A Violent Masterpiece” came out, in April, the Times Book Review dubbed it “the noir novel for our times.” In the noir tradition, Harper’s writing trains us not to set our hopes too high. Again and again, he shows us how would-be rebels who fight “the Beast” (as a few of them call L.A.’s power structure) get defeated and punished, often violently. His prose radiates an ecstatic pessimism, as if lit up from within by the relief of not having to sugarcoat things with comforting lies. “This wicked truth that moves under everything rises to the surface,” he writes, describing an outbreak of police violence against protesters. “The serpent that circles the world shows itself.”
But, as the new book hurtles toward its climax, it starts to seem as if at least some of Harper’s characters might eke out some kind of victory against the Beast. Is Harper, like so many noir writers before him, raising our hopes for the express purpose of dashing them against the rocks? Or is hope really in reach? If so, what kind?
“Noir,” a term originally coined by French critics to refer to certain American films made in the nineteen-forties, now refers to all manner of stories, onscreen and off, with a wide variety of preoccupations and stylistic tendencies. If there’s a single unifying fixation, it might be the contrast between surface and reality, and especially between superficially happy cover stories and subterranean despair. In the forties and fifties, noir stories of criminality thumbed their noses—with style—at the enforced cheeriness of postwar American life, dissenting from the era’s sunny master narrative: that the U.S. was always and forever a beacon of progress, an unambiguous force for good in the world, a place where hard work and upstanding behavior were always rewarded, and crime never paid. In the decades since, more recent variants have adapted this schema for other settings. West Coast noir insists that the sun-drenched beauty and free-spirit mythology of California hide a world of corruption and greed. Nordic noir suggests the presence of violence and hatred beneath the tranquillity and order of the Scandinavian welfare state, just as Southern noir peels back hospitality and charm to reveal repressed family secrets and moral decay.
