MANHATTAN MELTDOWN

A moody murder tale complicated by Covid-19 and other evidence of looming mortality.

Before he became a prolific novelist (The Dog Killer of Utica, 2014, etc.), Lentricchia was an academic scholar of postmodern literature. Fittingly, this melancholy novella reads like a Law & Order episode scripted by one of his favorite subjects, Don DeLillo. Eliot, a former private eye who’s figured in previous Lentricchia novels, arrives in New York with his longtime friend Antonio in March 2020 to sort out some family issues. They share a car into the city with their flight’s first officer, Gina, who’s the daughter of the airline’s CEO and niece of a notorious mobster. A couple of NYPD detectives draw Eliot and Antonio into the mob investigation, and much of the story involves untangling Gina’s involvement. But Lentricchia strives to avoid a familiar police-procedural story arc; the novel is girded with scenes of the aging friends killing time in Manhattan’s Yale Club, bantering about their failing septuagenarian bodies and busted relationships. (“Revenge-desire, kills on the inside. Heart destruction. High blood pressure. Eating binges. Look at your poundage. Forgive her.”) And as the coronavirus forces the city into lockdown, Topic A for everyone is fear of death. Elliot, coming off heart surgery, is skeptical about the virus (“It couldn’t have jumped over the entire continent in one leap and landed in New Rochelle. Is the Times that hysterical with fake news?”). One of the cops has to manage the mob case, his wife’s newfound aggressive cancer, and the murder of Gina's co-pilot. The novel is too brief to address any of these crises very deeply, but it successfully conjures up a city constricting upon itself and the feeling of asphyxiation it provokes in its characters.

An effective one-sitting crime story with an existential bent.