Review: Stephen Policoff's "Dangerous Blues"

So I must begin with a confession: Stephen Policoff is my godfather, was one of my father’s closest friends, and is one of the first humans I ever knew in my life. (My siblings are, I believe, the only people who still call him by his old nickname, Flip.) And for that reason I would ordinarily not review his new novel Dangerous Blues; the conflict of interest is too obvious. But I find myself so charmed by the book that I can’t help but write about it here. I’m biased, but I genuinely loved it.

Dangerous Blues is the story of Paul Brickner, a recent widower who’s moved from upstate New York back to Manhattan to find a better environment for him and his 11-year-old daughter, Spring. Haunted in the small town they shared as a family, he moves into the Greenwich Village apartment of a professor friend who’s on sabbatical. All too aware of his advancing age and perennially grouchy, Paul’s a writer, technically, but a listless and uninspired one, having made a living for most of his adulthood editing trade journals. Now, having fled to New York with Spring to try and escape his dead wife Nadia’s memory, he’s seeing her ghost everyone - and neither he nor we as readers are sure if her ghost is metaphorical or literal. She keeps appearing at random moments, hanging somewhere in the periphery, offering no commentary other than the mournful and quizzical look on her face. Increasingly prone to seeing an apparition he can’t identify as real or imagined, Paul questions his sanity and his ability to raise a young daughter.

This may not be a setup that sounds particularly promising to you, and I admit that at first I was worried that the “is it grief or is it a ghost” frame was clichéd. But while the book engages in the expected meditations on grieving and memory, it’s both balanced with humor and embedded in a larger, more interesting narrative. Soon after moving in, Paul and Spring befriend a woman named Tara and her daughter Irina, who’s Spring’s age. Tara is a singer with affection for Paul and a loose grasp on adult responsibility; she inserts herself into his life so casually that you barely notice at first. But eventually, Paul is forced to notice. While young women, Tara and her even-less-stable sister Maya escaped from the mysterious cult that they were born into, a cult obsessed with dreams and their impact on reality, led by someone named “The Father” who may or may not be their literal father. Their scattered and irresponsible style speaks to the traumas of their early lives. The sisters are still not free from their past, thanks in part to their possession of a mysterious flask that might be a piece of junk but might be a priceless artifact, stolen by the cult in a daring art museum robbery. These elements of the story make the book compulsively readable and embed the broader themes in a more compelling package than more straightforward grief narratives. What’s consistently entertaining is how utterly unequipped Paul is for all of it. He’s not the sort of person who should be dodging a cult’s thugs or trying to sort through the provenance of a mysterious artifact, but here he is anyway.

Of course, in my mind’s eye Paul is Flip, and I picture him wandering slightly befuddled through the twists of the story. Of course, as is true of most novels, there is both autobiography and pure invention in the character of Paul.

The title Dangerous Blues is a reference to a specific song and also to the book’s general motif of the blues, which haunt (if you’ll forgive me) the story. Paul’s not particularly a fan of the blues himself, and his musical tastes seem to adhere to his general aimlessness. But the apartment he’s staying in features a vast collection of hard-to-find vinyl, and Paul finds himself gravitating to old bluesmen, playing the same songs over and over again as a means to cope with the increasing confusion inspired by his late wife’s spectral visions. And the music brings him closer to Tara, with whom he has the kind of is-this-romantic-or-is-it-painfully-platonic relationship that will be familiar to most adults. Paul is very much not yet ready to move on, but he’s also lonely, not only in the way of someone whose wife has recently died but also in the sense of someone who finds himself out of time. A deft element of the novel is the way that it demonstrates how someone can have treated a happy marriage as a place to hide out, as a way to avoid keeping up with major elements of an evolving culture, as a means to avoid keeping up with change. You can’t ever imagine Paul swiping through Tinder, but you can imagine him falling a little bit in love with a mysterious bohemian singer from a small potatoes Village bar band.

Music animates the book, which is peppered with (mostly invented) lyrics from blues songs, and the depiction of the Village is bound up in this musicality. The loving, sad portrayal of that still-romantic, now impossibly expensive neighborhood is a real highlight of the book. Policoff depicts New York with the perspective of someone who’s lived here for almost fifty years, and thus has both a nostalgic and a relentlessly unsentimental vision of the city and neighborhood. Here’s where my relationship with the author really matters; I grew up hearing stories from him and my father about the scrapes they got into, living in NYC in the hoary old days in the 1970s. Policoff has been mugged too many times in real life to create a falsely sunny portrayal of what life was like in “authentic New York.” (In one charming story he once told me a mugger took his wallet, started walking away, then turned back around and broke his glasses, just for fun.) The Village, it’s fair to say, has changed. But in a sea of NYU students and $20-a-meal fast-casual salad places, the book still finds a countercultural heart. What makes this all the more poignant is Paul and Spring’s tenuous hold on where they live; they can only afford to stay in the neighborhood because they’re house-sitting, and it’s implied that the official tenant can only stay there because it’s faculty housing. The feeling of having a tenuous hold on all of it - home, family, sanity - animates Dangerous Blues.

The book’s also about late middle age, an era of life that we as a culture don’t really know what to do with. Certainly we marginalize senior citizens and treat them as disposable as well. But we do at least have shared social expectations of how the elderly should act and be, visions of wise old greyhairs who impart wisdom and think and speak carefully. I find that with late middle age, say perhaps 55 to 65, we don’t even have that kind of condescending cultural framework. Those in late middle age are too old to be young but too young to be old, still not ready for retirement (psychologically or financially), maybe past the point of drawing up big long-term career or education plans but not planning on dying anytime soon. Our art and media rarely depict them and, when they are depicted, they’re typically secure and untroubled in a nice house and stable marriage, looking ahead to their golden years. For me, Paul is an avatar of a generation of people who are still searching at that late date, who haven’t ever found exactly where they’re supposed to fit in, and whose once defiant and cool resistance to respectability has become in older age a kind of schlubby lack of respectability. Paul strikes me as the kind of guy who just sort of assumed money would work itself out one day, and then it never did. And with his wife Nadia gone, the ballast and sense-making instrument of his life is gone now too.

I also appreciated Paul as a depiction of an older parent. Paul is an unusually old father for an 11-year-old, and his mystified reaction to Spring’s behavior, language, and interests is a repeated source of amusement. My father was an old dad and, I hope, I will be too. My father didn’t plan it that way, and neither did I, and I don’t think Paul did either. But that’s just how it works out sometimes.

There’s some things I would change. I often think books are a little too long and advocate trimming, but I would have liked another twenty-five pages or so here. In particular, I would have enjoyed if the mystery of the flask was filled out a little more, the story of which ends up feeling a bit anticlimactic. I also think the plot relies a bit too heavily on contrivance - the mysterious flask’s owner sees it as something precious and to be protected, but is awfully casual about who she gives it to and what he does with it. It’s all a little convenient. But all in all, I found Dangerous Blues to be a lovely, deft, profoundly confident book, a brief little blast of story that’s animated by grief and longing and a vision of a New York City that’s long gone. It’s also a perfect example of the kind of book that’s been put out by a little press that deserves a much wider audience, one that would rarely attract the attention of a big house thanks to its modest themes and quiet strengths. Yes, I’m biased, and you can call me an unreliable narrator if you wish. But I think this is a lovely book that’s often mournful but never maudlin, a simple story of a grieving parent in the form of a mystery about an inscrutable cult and the MacGuffin it desperately chases. You can order Dangerous Blues here.

I have to warn you, though - Ghostie Boy Wilson isn’t real, and you can’t look up his songs. Which is a shame. The book will leave you desperate to hear them.