Innner city story of the clash between black street culture and a middle classs white guy. Convincing. ( )

I was expecting this to be a detective novel, and it was, sort of. A man who had escaped the poverty of a poor urban neighborhood in New Jersey and made good as a screenwriter in Hollywood returns to his old high school to teach a creative writing class, pro bono. Someone beats him up, putting him in the hospital; it is touch and go whether he will survive. A woman that he had helped in a somewhat similar situation, when they were both children, takes it on herself to unravel the mystery of who beat him up, so as to pay back her old debt to him. She happens to be a police detective, within a few months of retirement. For some reason, even when he is lucid enough to speak, he refuses to give her any information about who the attacker was.

Despite the detective-story framework, the book is really a character study, or rather, a study of a variety of characters, and especially why they do the seemingly inexplicable things they do. It is also about the need to be needed, and the paradox of selfish altruism. The absence of "Good" in the title is significant.

http://lookbackinanger.blogspot.com/2... ( )