Sergio De La Pava

Casi is a public defender in NYC. His stories about the inside workings of criminal justice system--the types of clients he gets and their crimes, the back and forth with prosecutors, his droll musings on the differences (and sometimes similarities) between what the law states and how it works out in real life, and the the frequent inequities in the law as applied--are always entertaining, but never lose sight of the fact that these are serious matters. To this extent, the book sometimes show more feels like non-fiction, albeit humorous and very readable non-fiction. For example, his explanation of how criminal defendants have been given, and why they need their Miranda rights is told in such a tongue-in-cheek way that even non-attorneys will get a kick out of reading his musings. As a retired attorney, (albeit one in a field with far, far less trial practice and with more affluent clients) I very much identified with Casi's descriptions. For example, this description of what it feels like to know you have a case that is going to trial instead of settling really spoke to me:

"...a case that goes to trial is a hideously deformed corporal appendage that forces you to hunch down in deference to its weight. Always on your mind despite your best efforts, but you don't dare kill it for fear that you, the host, will join in its demise..."

and at trial:

"...{there is a} legitimate response to observers who question a trial attorney's particular decision or action during trial. The response in distilled form is that things happen a lot faster in the well than they do for someone sitting on the fat ass in the audience."

However, the book is also a compelling work of fiction. Casi is driven and ambitious; he has never lost a case, and wants to carry the largest case load in the office. Then Dane, another obsessively competitive attorney in the office, proposes, at first in theory only, the idea of a perfect crime--if you knew you could never get caught, would become immensely wealthy as a result of your crime, and would hurt no one (other than perhaps drug dealers) would you commit that crime? It's not long before Dane proposes the commission of an specific crime, and soon Dane and a reluctant Casi (who still sees the idea in theoretical terms only) are working out the details.

The book is full of pop culture references which I had fun working out (i.e. "Come and knock on our door"--does anyone recognize that? Or how about "To the moon, Alice, to the moon"? And do you remember Father Mulcahey?) It's also a very leisurely, in a manic sort of way, book, and some might think it needs some brutal editing. I'm one who enoyed the Robin Williams like riffs on a wide variety of subjects with one exception. In the second half of the book, there are long digressions about boxing, and particularly the life and times of a particular boxer, Wilfred Benitez. (Is he real?) My personal view is that these boxing passages felt out of place and added nothing to the book. show less

Does anyone these days have the time to read a 640-page novel? I made the time and was glad of it! This remarkable book came to me as a reviewer for crimefictionlover.com, and it bucks convention in more ways than its length.
In all those pages, a lot happens—interesting, challenging stuff you won’t find in a typical novel. It includes a meditation on Time, an evisceration of professional football, a hilarious take-down of the U.S. health care system, an exploration of the meaning of show more loneliness and the futility of religion. Fundamentally, however, it’s a kaleidoscopic, postmodern approach to the question “what is justice?” All the while, Sergio de la Pava’s sly sense of humor keeps the pages turning, as situations at first merely odd spiral out of control like a poorly judged forward pass.
Characters are described with juicy details that make their stories tantalizing, and as the story settles down, two principal characters emerge. The first is Nina Gill, former co-owner and brains behind the wildly successful Dallas Cowboys. Family maneuvering gives her a football team of her own—not the Cowboys, the decidedly non-competitive Paterson (N.J.) Pork. Nina is a woman who gets what she wants, and what she mostly wants is a winning football team. The NFL players are in a lockout, the owners have cancelled the season, and gutsy Nina recruits men desperate to play. Her second-in-command is college student Dia Nouveau, and the laugh-out-loud banter between tough Nina and can-do Dia is like the script for a screwball comedy, sometimes even written in script format.
Nuno DeAngelis is a career lawbreaker headed to Rikers Island. Nuno is a philosopher. “They can put him in Rikers, but they can’t make him live there.” The story of his life in prison, how he gets out and back in again, is written in what you might call a suprarealistic style, not as gritty crime drama, but floating somewhere above reality. But, since he’s there, his various connections give him assignments: avenge a vehicular homicide, snatch a Salvador Dali painting Nina wants . . . you know, the usual prison malarkey. Nuno writes his own brief for his Grand Jury proceeding, and it’s both expletive-laced and morally persuasive.
Trying to give a sense of the plot of a novel this sprawling is probably irrelevant. De la Pava has created a three-ring circus involving clowns, daredevils, and high-wire performers, creating extraordinary characters from people engaged in seemingly ordinary activities—a 911 call transcriber, a man caring for his ailing mother, a parking garage operator, a priest in a dwindling parish, and a failed doctor who becomes the Paterson Pork mascot.
De la Pava’s first novel, 2008’s A Naked Singularity, was originally self-published, but when the University of Chicago Press discovered and republished it in 2012, it received the PEN/Bingham Prize for best debut novel of the year. His is a refreshing and unforgettable voice, one that busts out of the boxes of both crime and literary fiction, stretching the form and the reader as well. show less

This was most enjoyable in the first half when it was mostly just a mystery with a compelling protagonist and some snappy writing. The main character mixed a certain poetic dreaminess with quick-witted snark in a way that initially was fun and he appeared to have some slowly revealing depth and history to him. But it lost me by the second half.
Mondragon was a deeply uninteresting villain. None of the scenes he was in captured my interest and I grew tired of hearing this man circle around show more and around trying to make basic sadism and egotism sound impressive.
Then the story spiraled further from the more grounded beginnings into stranger and more convoluted plots. Every scene lengthened with philosophizing which I grew less tolerant toward. It might have been in part because I’d already been put off by Mondragon’s monologuing and wasn’t as engaged with the book anymore, but I didn’t think the exploration of the existential questions posed was actually very thought-provoking or plumbing any real depths. show less

This is the most satisfying reading experience I've had since I kicked off 2016 with [b:The Recognitions|395058|The Recognitions|William Gaddis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309209622s/395058.jpg|1299804]. This is a significant achievement for a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer (born in 1970, Sergio de la Pava self-published this novel in 2008 via XLibris) and a testament to an individual's vision over the strictures and biases of the marketplace. Like [b:The Recognitions|395058|The show more Recognitions|William Gaddis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309209622s/395058.jpg|1299804], [b:You Bright and Risen Angels|45633|You Bright and Risen Angels|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389841557s/45633.jpg|2310146], [b:V.|5809|V.|Thomas Pynchon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328110787s/5809.jpg|2999000], and, more recently, [b:Novel Explosives|29363276|Novel Explosives|Jim Gauer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1461083307s/29363276.jpg|49608696], A Naked Singularity is a constituent of a tradition of debut novels that shatters conventions and expectations. Pava reaches wildly for every pulsing fiber of life, transforms it into metaphor, analyses it exhaustively, and pins it to his specimen board like an obsessive lepidopterist. The result, an 864-page novel (in the hardcover MacLehose Press edition), is a museum of twenty-first century consciousness.

If there is one thing that can be said about this hefty tome, it is that, unlike many books billed as such, it is savagely hilarious. I'm not talking about a quippy little amused-chortle-and-forgotten type of humor; I mean, Pava is obviously quite comical and it shines through on page after page. And the humor is wide-ranging, too, not just the same brand of puns or off-the-way-bananas gags. No, this book offers all kinds of comedic entertainment from pitch-perfect deadpan sarcasm to the utterly side-splitting 10-page episode involving Señor Smoke burritos. I'm not sure I ever laughed so hard in my life as stilted lawyerly locution is brought to bear on a bathetic scatological scandal. For the most part, though, the laughing gas is served up at small, quick clips while the narrative races you headlong toward the conclusion.

The protagonist, apparently a stand-in for the author himself, is the perfect blend of a character readers like me want to follow. We get to the point in the narrative that we cannot wait to hear his take on one situation or thought or another. At once, he is: a charismatic, driven public defender (the opening 50 pages are dedicated to getting a sense of a day in his frenetic life, effortlessly moving from one client to another spinning webs of logic and rhetoric to circumvent even the most dire of charges, surmounting defeatism repeatedly); a successful individual who has, at twenty-four years of age, established a perfect defense record in the courtroom; an amateur philosopher, pulling out the ideas of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Locke, Leibniz, and Popper at will; an admirer of musicians of the ilk of Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen (he blasts Malmsteen's "Far Beyond the Sun" through his headphones in the courtroom!); a possessor of intelligently drôle humor that asserts a sort of control variable to the madness swirling around him (for a while, at least); and the perfect counterpoint to the enigmatic Dane, who will take us into explorations of perfection and mediocrity and failure ad nauseum.

Indeed, one of the book's greatest strengths is in it relentless and multifarious perspectives and ruminations of mediocrity. Dane, who is obsessed with achieving perfection, presents his latest in a spate of ploys to attain his goal: the perfect lawyerly representation. He plans to channel everything into this one case, whatever the cost to himself. But: "If it turned out I was no better than the average chump, if I was unable to achieve perfection even when every fiber in my being was pointed towards this simple goal, then I would accept it, this soul-robbing mediocrity, like a man" (237). Again, this aspiration is beautifully counterpoised with: "...chances were nobody could be as smart as I thought I was, and fools are often the last to know their status as such" (293). But the whole plight to transcend the dregs of mediocrity is so deftly drawn in this book that this theme alone makes it a universal text. How many people have I listened to who feel trapped and even like failures because of our culture's constant message that we can be and do whatever we want if we just work hard enough? It's simply not true and it is hindering more than it is helping, even if it does sound inspirational. Of course, money helps a bit, and the novel really takes off when Dane introduces this (complicating) factor into the plot.

To be continued. show less