 The Dewey Decimal “System”byNicki Leone
I’ll admit, if I was going to pick a place to go to ground in a post-apocalyptic New York City, the main branch of the New York Public Library would probably be my first choice—especially if it was, as is the case in Nathan Larson’s amusing debut novel—one of the few places still receiving erratic periods of electrical power. Think of it: the world is a mess outside. Anarchy reigns. Nothing is as it should be. Nothing will ever be as it should be again. But here, in the all but abandoned cavernous halls, in the dimly lit (when the power is working) sanctum of the Reading Room, there is nothing to do but read. Shelve books. Thumb through the accumulated wisdom of a destroyed age. Toss in a supply of pistachios to munch on and life is as good as it gets in the Big Apple after a major bio-terrorism attack. Gone to ground in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library is exactly what the main character of Larsen’s novel has done. He doesn’t have a name. Well, he probably has one but he doesn’t remember it, so he calls himself Dewey Decimal and he is the self-appointed librarian to this edifice of no longer very relevant knowledge. The other vagrants that sometimes inhabit the halls call him “the librarian.” Dewey Decimal may not remember his real name, or anything that happened to him before he woke up in a military hospital after the New York City disaster, (what he does remember, he doesn’t trust) but he is certain of a few things. He’s certain he’s addicted to the medication he has to take to keep calm and keep his heart from exploding. He’s certain that he knows how to kill, and that he is good at it. He’s certain that to survive in a world-gone-mad you need to have a system, and you need to follow it religiously. Dewey Decimal, has a System. To keep himself in meds and pistachios, Dewey rents himself out as a thug for one of the chief bigwigs in what’s left of the wreck of the city, District Attorney Daniel Rosenblatt. Dewey is the heavy that gets the jobs Rosenblatt doesn’t want advertised. He leans on smaller thugs, eliminates more serious competition, passes along warnings and threats and sometimes consequences. As a rule, he doesn’t have a problem with any of this, although he thinks Rosenblatt is a douchebag. Or, as Dewey puts it, a “mouth-breathing, weak-jawed, beta male-type individual who seems to demand righteous abuse. Best uses of such a person include minesweeping, drawing sniper fire away from more useful personnel, and disposal of unexploded ordinance.” But that changes when the DA hands him his latest assignment—to make the leader of a group of Ukrainian laborers involved in The Great Reconstruction of the city “go away.” “Permanently” is understood. Dewey marks out his target, finds him a little more resilient than he is expecting, and in the process of looking for chinks in the armor, runs into the target’s wife. Who shoots him. Even a post-apocalyptic noir story needs a femme fatale. Emphasis on the “fatal.” Dewey starts to suspect that the DA has given him less of the story than usual, and that everyone he runs into—from the mark to the honey trap to the Feds he trips over to the Lincoln town car that suddenly starts following him around—has a secret agenda that he, the librarian, is inadvertently interfering with. As he tries to dig himself out of the hole the DA has apparently dumped him into and still follow the Dewey Decimal System (only make left turns in the morning, take subway trains in alphabetical order, help pretty women even if they shoot you, keep your key in one pocket, keep your meds in the other pocket, keep your gun loaded, never ever run out of Purell, etcetera, etcetera) Dewey finds himself making enemies of former friends, friends of people he thought were enemies, and all the while chasing a criminal who he thinks is chasing a girl, who in turn is chasing something she won’t tell him about. That noir-ish sensibilities are peculiarly suited to dystopian settings will come as a surprise to no one who has read Philip K. Dick or seen the movie Blade Runner. It’s an old story, the flawed character following his own moral compass on the mean streets. And the streets get pretty mean in dystopian fiction. They get pretty mean in the days after the Valentine’s Day attack and subsequent Superflu contagion that decimated Dewey Decimal’s city. But as Dewey bounces from one violent encounter to the next, the thing we are most struck by is not the strangeness of this rubble-strewn half-destroyed city, but its familiarity. Crooked politicians and gold-digging social climbers. Union bosses and guns-for-hire. Good hearted prostitutes, hard-as-nails trophy wives. Exclusive parties in high-rise penthouses and seedy deals in the back rooms of low-rent store fronts. Sure the Army may have set up check points at what’s left of the Brooklyn Bridge, but the city underneath is the same as it ever was. This familiarity—of plot, of atmosphere—is what makes The Dewey Decimal System entertaining, although not compelling. The book calls to mind a plethora of other novels—from the Tourette’s-inhibited protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn to the paranoid schizophrenic of George Dawes Green’s The Caveman's Valentine. At one point, even scenes from Escape from New York come irresistibly to mind (there is something Snake Pliskin-like in Dewey Decimal’s obvious special ops skills, not to mention his tendency to walk around limping and wounded). Perhaps the novel is a tribute to all of these and then some. It’s telling that reviewers and blurbers can barely reign themselves in when talking about all the books and authors this book and author evoke. Myself included. But while all these literary antecedents explain why the book is fun to read, they also are the reason that the book sometimes feels derivative. The Dewey Decimal System is a patched-together creation made from parts of other iconic characters and scenes sewn up into a Frankenstein-monster like story. The story itself—by which I mean, the actual plot—doesn’t always make sense and instead relies for most of its momentum on the kind of motion that develops when a person is pushed down a steep hill and loses their balance, so that the only thing they can do is tumble on down. Dewey tumbles. He rolls. He careens. “I’m a pinball,” he says, “seeking the center of gravity.” Needless to say, the center of gravity eludes him. The center of gravity that knits a story together into a coherent whole also sometimes eludes the author, who can’t resist occasionally interrupting the flow of the action to take pot shots at thinly-disguised celebrities and politicians. George W. and the Trumps come in for some no doubt well-deserved abuse, but the bang he gets for his buck doesn’t quite make up for breaking into this tangled plot of war criminal hunts, smuggling, treasure hunts, and super secret government super soldier programs. Nor are Dewey’s quirks—like his compulsion to only make left turns which has him not so much traversing the city as spiraling through it, or his obsessive need to douse himself in Purell at every opportunity (something that, let’s face it, you can see any day by watching germophobes attempting to navigate the supermarket with actually touching anything “icky”)—ultimately anything more than window-dressing for a character who is basically Sam Spade with amnesia and a hefty dose of paranoia. This isn’t a bad thing, but neither is it a new thing. In the end amidst all the strange events fueled by not-so-strange motives, it is hard to escape the feeling that Dewey would have been better off if he just hadn’t left the house, er, library that morning. Some days it’s just best to stay inside and read a book. And that, rather than the left turns and the rule about helping pretty girls, may be the best thing about Dewey Decimal’s “system.” Books mentioned in this column:
Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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