SOUTH OF BOSTON . . .

A couple of days ago I drove my niece to T. F. Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island. As we passed through Providence on I-95, she quizzed me about the city, which she had never seen before. I didn’t have much to say: I’ve been there a few times for college basketball or hockey games at the Civic Center; I’ve been to a couple of fine theater productions at the Performing Arts Center; I’ve been to Providence College a couple of times for academic reasons; I dropped off one of my daughters at Brown University so she could visit a friend . . . I guess I was a bit muted in my enthusiasm, but I didn’t try to explain that most of my vaguely unfavorable impressions of the city were formed—perhaps unfairly—back in 1989 by a couple of pieces written by Boston Globe columnist Jack Thomas: “Providence a ‘hot city’? Heaven help us!” and “Providence reconsidered: It’s still Palookaville.” Since then the city has had a big upgrade (they even re-routed the river that runs through it) . . . but I still remember taking perverse pleasure in Thomas’s scathingly funny exposés of Providence’s flaws and foibles at that time.

So maybe it wasn’t coincidental that the book I chose to start my “summer reading period” (June thru August) was Geoffrey Wolff’s 1986 novel titled . . . Providence. Of course, any book with that title has to have a metaphorical dimension to it, and most likely an echo of Paradise Lost: “The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” But if there is an element of divine guidance in the lives of Wolff’s characters, it must be subsumed into the grit of day-to-day existence in the grim world he inscribes in the novel. Wolff’s portrait of Providence is hardly flattering; here is the pride of place filtered, with only a trace of authorial irony, through the consciousness of one of his lowlife criminal characters:

If you lived in a jerkwater that outsiders bombed past on their way to Cape Cod, if you lived fifty miles south of a city that called itself The Hub, if you spent time telling people you chose to live in Providence because who needed the hassle of a big city, who needed to spend an hour looking for a parking place, who needed the pressure—well, if you lived in Providence it was difficult not to feel a shiver of pride when you were reminded (and you were reminded) that the whole New England mob got run out of a laundry on Atwells Avenue.

But as a novel—well, as a crime novel (for that is what it really is)—Providence is really quite engaging. (And I do not read many crime novels . . .) While he inclines at times more toward telling than showing—substituting lengthy passages of center-of-consciousness oblique narrative for direct action and dialogue—Wolff clearly applies his writerly skills to the task he sets for himself, and the result is a page-turner. An ensemble piece centered around five characters—a terminally ill defense lawyer and his wife plus a corruptible police lieutenant and a small-time crook with wise-guy ambitions who share an attraction to a doozey of a floozy—the novel has some nicely finessed twists and turns of plot which allow the complexity of the characters to emerge naturally.

I had no intention of starting my summer reading with a novel like this—and certainly not with this very novel, which I happened to pick up just the day before I drove my niece through Providence. But it proved to be a good read . . . and thus a good start to the summer.