Hollywood Lanes by Megan Abbott, 2007
The magic trick:
A young narrator who drives the story with a mix of innocence and fatalism
I’m very excited for this week of stories on the SSMT site, even more than most theme weeks.
Akashic, you might know, publishes a series of excellent Noir books – each book set in a different place – full of great stories of violence and scheming at society’s strange margins. Megan Abbott participated in several collections, and lucky me, all of them were readily available as e-books to check out from my local library here in Montgomery County, Maryland. So here we go. A week of Megan Abbott noir.
We start in Queens with my favorite story of the bunch, “Hollywood Lanes.” The Coen Brothers would be well-served to adapt this one. It’s so dark and a little bit funny and a little bit weird and so alluring and so good.
I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t read it and should be going to their local library right now for their copy of Queens Noir. But I’ll just say that the narrator imbues the story with a strange combination of naivete and fatalism, and the plot follows suit.
And that’s quite a trick on Abbott’s part.
The selection:
No one could figure him and Sherry. Sherry with the damp, faded-blond features, eyes empty as the rubber dish tub she was always resting her dusty elbows on. Cracking gum, staring open-mouthed at the crowds, the families, the amateur baseball team, the VFW fellas, the beery young marrieds swinging their arms around, skidding down the lanes, collapsing into each other’s laps after each crash of the pins, Sherry never moved, except to shift her weight from one spindly leg to another.
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